


Phoenix

by divine_rose



Category: Kingdom Hearts
Genre: Angst, Axel is only a moderately competent babysitter, Body Horror, Canon Compliant, Character Study, Divorce, M/M, The organization is not nice, background soriku, fire puns, friends don't let friends get trapped in evil organizations, lesser nobodies are creepy send tweet, lots of swearing, meditations on death, so many fire puns, we going through the whole timeline lads buckle up
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-11-10
Updated: 2020-02-13
Packaged: 2021-01-26 13:00:34
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 4
Words: 28,477
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21374542
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/divine_rose/pseuds/divine_rose
Summary: Somehow, despite everything Axel was still here.Which was quite something since he had died far more times than anyone ever should.He'd like to think of himself as rising from the ashes every time, but he felt more like a bug no one found a way to sufficiently squash.--Multi-part long fic on the various lives and deaths of one very stubborn Nobody.
Relationships: Axel/Saïx (Kingdom Hearts), Isa/Lea (Kingdom Hearts)
Comments: 6
Kudos: 59





	1. Part I

**Author's Note:**

> All the love for my favorite literal dumpster fire who just keeps coming back.

As a kid, Lea had never been particularly fond of the local library. 

Sure, Ansem the Wise, with his affinity for inquiry and knowledge, made sure it was a sprawling thing of beauty if you were into that sort of thing, but as with many things in Radiant Garden the seemingly warm opulence betrayed a cold, clinical nature underneath that Lea even as a kid felt uneasy around. He never did well with facades. Maybe that was why he liked Isa so much. 

Isa was very much “what you see is what you get”, and what you got was a withdrawn, dry, and cynical child that made the contrast to Lea’s joy and childish mischief all too apparent. They were an odd pair by the adults’ standards, but if Isa kept Lea out of most troubles and if Lea got Isa out of his shell then they were willing to put up with it. 

And Isa, his best friend in the entire world, loved spending time in the worlds’ forsaken library of all places. So by extension, Lea spent time there too. Even when it was summer and they could be doing anything besides reading musty old books. 

That wasn’t to say that –despite their friendship–there wouldn’t be a seemingly endless barrage of whining from Lea, who just couldn’t seem to sit still. Even when he spoke he was always moving in a way, shifting weight, talking with hands. He had so much energy and it was going to go somewhere. 

Today was one of the last days of summer and here they were, in the damn library. Usually he’d only have to put up with this place just long enough for Isa to pick up some books and they would leave and be back to their usual shenanigans. Except today was one of the last days of summer. And the deadline of summer homework was looming ever closer. 

When Isa said yesterday that they were taking tomorrow to just get the thing out of the way, Lea didn’t think he was actually serious. Or rather Lea was convinced he could talk him out of it, put it off until the next day and the next. It wouldn’t be so hard, right? Sure, he was a bit of a procrastinator by nature, but things always worked out well enough in the end. 

The library was cool in contrast to the late summer heat, and quiet to the point of being unbearable. He craned his neck over to where he knew the librarian to lurk. When he didn't see her, Lea promptly hopped up onto the table beside where Isa was reading and taking notes. He swung his legs a bit, and leaned forward to rest his arms on his knees, peering at the pages of Isa's book; if he didn't do something he was going to go insane. He hated silence and this place was too quiet and Isa was too quiet and —

“Hey.” He didn’t really give much care for the volume of his voice. “You’ve been at that forever, you almost done?” It occurred to him that he could possibly be helping out on this endeavor, but that sounded a bit too much like work and that was the last thing he wanted to do on one of the last days of summer. 

Isa’s eyes glanced up from the pages of the book at him before flicking down again, turning a page. 

“It would go a lot quicker if someone was actually pulling their weight.” 

To anyone else the words would seem to have bite, but Lea knew better. His lips stretched into a grin as he removed the popsicle stick he had been chewing on from his mouth and used it to point. “Got me there,” he laughed. “Fine, I help and we leave this dusty old place and don’t set a foot back in it until the summer is over.” He waved the stick a bit for emphasis. Isa gave him a weary look before putting a weighty old book in Lea’s outstretched hand. 

“At least it’s cool in here. You’re going to get heat stroke the way you run around in weather like that.” Isa gestured lightly to the nearby window, where the heat of the summer was making the world seem wrinkly and kids were trying to see if they could cook eggs on the sidewalk. The verdict was yes, because they had tried it yesterday.

“I don’t mind the heat. It’s not summer without it,” Lea chirped briskly as he opened the book, thumbing idly through the pages. “What’s our report on again?” he asked almost instantly. 

“Mythological creatures,” Isa said immediately on the heels of Lea’s question, as if he’d known Lea would ask it. “Try to keep up.” 

“Right,” Lea drawled, thumbing through the tome until he landed on a page that seemed to pique his interest. 

The illustration that went with the passage seemed to depict a massive fire, but upon closer inspection it was a bird — a bird made entirely of flames. He examined the image a bit, much more interested in it then the text as he noticed the fiery bird seemed to have risen from the ashes and bone. Something about this drew his eye, in a morbid sort of way that he was unsure of the mechanics of why. He glanced at the title of this particular passage. 

It was a phoenix.

* * *

  
  


His life, in a twisted sort of way, was rather defined by his death. 

The first death especially. There had been several at this point; he was rather good at keeping track. 

The first one — the worst one in his opinion, because they got oddly easier with time or maybe death was a bit less existentially terrifying when you’d been through it a couple times — was the kind that still sent him snapping awake at night. 

It loomed and haunted because he had died at 16. He had died 6 months after the library and the phoenix and had spent 10 years of his life dead. He was a revenant (and that was the most polite way to put it)—a walking husk. He looked and sounded and moved the same, but was so empty underneath that those first few nights of being a Nobody left him clawing and punching at his chest, longing for a sensation of something that just wouldn’t come. A beat or thump, anything. 

What was the damned point of living if it was like this? 

He’d have much rather that bastard who caused all this — the sick fuck who kept a girl locked up as his personal lab rat and now paraded around with a overinflated sense of importance for someone who wasn’t suppose to really exist and demanded to be called Superior — had just killed him. Better dead than damned and subjugated. 

Isa seemed to be taking all of this in stride, which made the memory of anger and frustration curl in his gut like a fire springing to life. He wanted someone, especially his friend, to be there for him in phantom anger, to talk him through the maddening nature of having been a child one minute who felt so much and now being  _ this _ . Isa was there with him when it happened — hell, he had gotten his  _ before _ Lea, as his shiny new number indicated, and he was Lea’s best friend.f anyone was going to understand this crawling, aching absence that he felt then it would be him. 

The castle that they were forced to call home now was cold and clinical like the library of Radiant Garden, but unlike the library it didn’t seem to have a need for false appearances. It was cold through and through, old and empty. Its long, clinical white hallways and staircases and rows of neat little rooms reminded him of those neat little cells in the basement of Hollow Bastion where the men that now occupied the majority of this little outfit held children prisoner and experimented on them. Now they had 3 half-dead children under their wings. 

One benefit of this wretched place was that it was so big and sprawling that it left plenty of places to go when he wanted to be left alone. If someone wanted him they could come looking for him in one of the many hallways — and look forever for all he cared. It was a reprieve from those bastards acting like they weren’t directly responsible for the way that he was now — the way that him and Isa were now, as they made them wear cloaks that felt too heavy on their young shoulders and fight with weapons no 16-year-old should even be looking at, much less throwing around — much less being made to throw around at  _ each other _ . 

So here he was on a slanted piece of rooftop in this mockery of a castle in this mockery of a world, staring out at the perpetual night sky and desperately trying to summon up memory enough of emotion to give the nebulous ghost of frustration he felt an outlet. 

He figured out pretty early on into this new existence that he couldn’t cry. 

Guess you needed a heart to do that. Instead, it left phantom memories of emotion bubbling up in his gut with no outlet. There was just nothing, building and building and then nothing. He slammed a fist into the nearby wall. 

Pain shot through his hand like lightning because that punch was a little too hard, but it felt like something so he did it again, and again until cement began to crack and until the knuckles of his gloves felt slick with blood. He had found out before that Nobodies could still bleed. 

There was a hiss behind him as the air was torn asunder, the familiar sound of a dark corridor opening behind him. 

“I’m a bit inclined to ask what the wall ever did to you, but I find myself more interested in why you’re out here in the first place.” The voice was dry, emotionless and familiar. 

“Isa.” The greeting was more like a sigh hissed through clenched teeth and pain but hey, pain was  _ something _ . 

“Saïx,” his friend quickly corrected, a routine done countless times now. 

“Whatever.” He didn’t turn to face him, instead staring at cracked concrete and blood that had seeped through his gloves on impact. 

Silence hung in the air, and unlike before, Axel made no move to remedy it for several long, agonizing moments, so Saïx spoke first. 

“I asked why you’re — “ He began. 

“Do you remember shortly before all… this…” he interrupted, gesturing nebulously at them both. “When we first found her we could have saved her, but we couldn’t break the locks on the doors…” 

“Of course I remember,” Saïx said, clearly unsure where all this was leading but going along with the tangent, “You cried, if memory serves.” There was something Axel would dare call  _ mean _ about those words if he didn’t know better. But he did — or at least he thought he did. 

“I was _frustrated, _Isa!” He whirled on him then, and Saïx didn’t bother to correct him this time. “We were right _there!_ We could have saved her! Could have stopped this all before she vanished into thin air and, well… this happened!” He gestured again, jagged and with the ghost of anger. “I felt _so _much and it was like a fucking dam broke.” 

“Axel,” Saïx said sternly, seemingly unmoved by this faux display of passion. “Where are you going with this?” 

Axel visibly cringed at the use of his new name. “I’m saying it…” he fought for the correct words for a bit, but finding none better went ahead anyway, “ _ feels _ like that all the time, except there’s no break, nothing, it just sits there!” It felt pathetic when put to words, somehow. 

“You’re a Nobody; you don’t feel anything.” 

_“I_ _KNOW THAT!”_ Axel snapped, far too quickly. He didn’t know how to put it, didn’t have the words to vocalize that in a way it often felt like the last things he felt before he died were baked into him as a Nobody. Anger and sorrow with a sprinkling of helplessness. Bake until bitter and burnt around the edges. Bon Appetit. 

Saïx seemed to have had his fill of this conversation; he usually did when Axel tried to steer close to any topic resembling what happened to them or what they were now and what it meant. He opened a portal with an ease Axel had yet to master, nor wanted to master. “Then maybe you still need that old good luck charm,” his friend said dryly as he stepped into the darkness. It collapsed around his fleeting back. 

Axel stared long and hard at the space Saïx had once occupied, the last biting words ringing in his head. For the first time the words had actually seemed biting. Not that Nobodies could imbue words with genuine emotional meaning, right? 

The next day, he drew the upside down teardrops under his eyes. 

  
  


* * *

  
  


The day after that he discovered the fire. 

It hadn’t been wholly intentional, really. 

They had been made to spar again under Lexaeus’s ever watchful, ever silent eye. They were always made to spar against one another. No other opponents. The higher-ups claimed it was because he and Saïx were the same age and they weren’t interested in accidentally killing one of their ranks, but Axel suspected there were other reasons. 

Still, today was particularly…fraught. 

It began the moment Axel walked into the room with those marks under his eyes. 

For one incredible moment, Axel swore he saw genuine emotion on Saïx’s face. The first spark of something since the  _ incident,  _ really, and Axel reveled in it. 

_ Oh, so you are still alive in there, aren’t you? _

He took his place opposite in the rather large room, walls dented and cracked from exercises past. Summoning his weapons became easier and easier with each day. When they had first sprung to life at his call, two large bladed wheels like a perversion of his childhood, he couldn’t help but let out a laugh, hollow as it was. 

Of fucking course. 

“I can’t believe you.” Saïx’s hiss brought him back from the memory. Axel just grinned. 

“What? You really can’t complain you know.” He pointed to one of the marks he had drawn under his eye, taunting. “This was  _ your _ idea!” He knew Saïx had been facetious. But Saïx had also been a bitch, and seemed to take every and any mention of emotion like someone had just barged in and kicked his dog. f Axel could get  _ his  _ kicks (or rather the memory of them) from pissing him off, especially after yesterday, then he was going to do it. 

In a flash Saïx was on him. He’d expected it, really; his friend was all charge and little tact when it came to a fight. He had already brought up his chakrams to block. 

“What’s the damn point? You can’t  _ feel  _ anything!” his friend snarled at him, pushing his weapon forward harder and making Axel to quickly shift weight and push back to keep the block going. 

“You don’t think I  _ know  _ that?!” he hissed through clenched teeth, struggling to keep the block and trying to find a moment to parry. 

“Then why do you pretend like you don’t?!” 

Gee. Axel really wished that whatever Saïx was going through he wouldn’t take it out on him so much. 

“ _ Well. _ ” He somehow managed coy despite there being a rather large weapon inches from his face. “ _ Excuse  _ me, mister number 7,  _ sir.  _ I guess I’ll just go and do my best zombie impression if that’ll make you  _ oh  _ so happy.” 

Saïx only sneered at him, and if he didn’t know better he would  _ really  _ say that the thought of Axel pretending to express emotion so vividly was angering him. 

“You can pretend all you want.” He dropped his voice to a whisper now, mostly since their obvious bickering was drawing attention from their so-called supervisor. “But like me, you don’t actually feel anything and you know you don’t. There is nothing there; you’re not Lea, so why don’t you stop pretending to be something that’s dead and buried and start—“

“ _ SHUT UP!”  _

Axel was only aware he spoke because the yell sounded like him. There was a rush of something that began in his gut and coiled upwards and outwards, a gust of wind and heat and he slowly began to realize that he had successfully parried Saïx, who now stood several feet back still holding a hastily thrown-up block, dying embers on his coat. 

He also slowly became aware of the smell of smoke and heat, close enough that it should’ve been unbearable — and yet it wasn't. He looked down slowly. 

Oh. 

He was on fire. 

Realization slowly dawned and he couldn’t help it. 

He  _ laughed.  _

It was the closest thing to genuine as he could get.

“Axel!”

He heard Saïx yell, but he couldn’t be bothered by it. When he saw his friend step towards him, he experimentally held out his hand, curious. With the faintest of efforts and will, he conjured a wall of flame to separate them. 

_ Worlds, _ it was so… easy. 

Axel turned on his heel with a certain amount of grace, fire licking his heels as he dismissed his chakrams with a whirl of the blades and a new whirl of flame. Before Lexaeus could say anything, Axel summoned and vanished into a dark corridor.

“I’m done here.” 

With any luck he could burn this entire place to the ground. 

  
  


* * *

  
  


Surprisingly enough, Nobodies could still dream. Whether this was cruel or kind, Axel wasn’t sure. Guess if you had a consciousness then no matter what state of being (or unbeing) you found yourself in, you could still dream. 

There just seemed to be nothing to chase away the bad ones. 

He hadn’t been particularly prone to nightmares as a person, but he remembered a couple standouts from his youth. The kind that woke him up in a cold sweat and calling for distant parents.

(What happened to his parents anyway?)

He seemed more prone to them now, oddly enough. Maybe because he was so close to darkness, one foot in one foot out. So close he could taste it like a bad aftertaste when he walked through corridors. Noxious air gone sour and ash. 

Could Nobodies be haunted? It was always the same old song again and  _ again.  _ Same nightmare. Same ghost of terror echoing in his bones so deep they  _ ached,  _ as if it searched for a heart to torment, found nothing,and bounced back in an endless, screaming echo. 

The nightmare always began the same. 

The basement of the castle in Radiant Garden. Edges of vision slowly darkening like someone was dimming the lights or he was slowly dying. Whichever. Darkness bleeding from the ceiling like blood, bubbling up from cracks in formerly pristine tile.  _ Drip drip dripping  _ down. 

It would be like rain if it wasn’t cold and slimy and almost  _ alive _ in a way he wasn’t comfortable thinking about. He’d look up and two drops would fall perfectly on his cheeks, sliding down and leaving cold dark marks that sent a full body shiver through him because the touch of the stuff just felt so wrong. 

He’d look back down, and that would be when the fun  _ really  _ started. 

He’d look back down and see two large yellow eyes staring back at him. Owl-ike almost. A creature that needed big eyes to see in the dark. Except when he looked into the glow of them he looked  _ beyond  _ the glow of them. Endlessly and soul-suckingly because it was around this time that he would recall that he had a soul (had). Which meant that he had something to lose. 

Panic would begin to bubble up much like the viscous darkness coming up from the floor tiles, and what an utter  _ joy  _ it was to recall an emotion so lovely as  _ existential terror  _ in his sleep and not something nice like summer or first kisses or—

It would be then the mass of darkness and eyes would surge forward. It would always surge toward and he’d always react too slow and he’d always find a claw in his chest, tangible and intangible, a strange feeling as if something nebulous as water had solidified just enough to shove its hand through his chest. 

The beast would always win.

Always. 

_ Always.  _

And he’d always find himself staring too long at a gaping heart-shaped hole in which he would only assume was its chest and grimly thinking,  _ Well, guess that’ll be full now, _ and looking at spikes down its head and back in a pattern a bit  _ too _ familiar and the overwhelming sensation of  _ wrong  _ and  _ terror  _ and then—nothing. Just nothing. It all came to a stop as if someone had yanked a plug and all the lights turned off. 

He’d wake up with the ghost of terror echoing through him like dying embers, and he’d either roll over and try to get some sleep or quietly creep into Saïx’s room without words and try to forget. 

Nobodies couldn’t be haunted, because he was already a ghost. 

  
  


* * *

  
  


He became well-acquainted with what could happen if one disobeyed the Organization fairly early on. Lea had been an unruly teenager, and Axel was all of that unruliness combined with contempt combined with whatever happens when one genuinely lacks the ability to fear anything. 

Sure, he could call upon memories, but memories lacked the punch of real emotions and were more an act to keep himself from going insane, really. It was better when you didn’t remember that you were a glorified corpse. 

He found out quickly how wrong he was. 

It was bound to happen: the first time he  _ neglected  _ to follow through on an order. In this case, it was to seek out new members for their little outfit. Shouldn’t have been too hard: haunt Twilight Town a bit since Nobodies liked to crop up there so much, look for anything resembling a human, and bring them back. Easy. 

Except Axel had no real interest in playing pawn collector. He had spent a year or two now as a Nobody, growing up under the “doting” eye of the  _ Superior  _ and hell if he could tell the next guy to bug off and enjoy whatever fleeting non-existence they had without being some pawn in whatever game that bastard was playing at then he was going to do it. Spare them, really. He wished he’d been given that option. 

So when he saw a fresh out of the oven higher Nobody come stumbling into existence one day outside of the old mansion, he promptly turned the other cheek and spent the afternoon high up and away from it all on the clock tower. 

At least he did for all of an hour before he found himself yanked through a corridor and slammed into his chair in the round room so hard it momentarily knocked the wind from his lungs. He gripped the arms of the chair tightly and looked rather indignantly across from his as to the culprit only to see Saïx appear in his own seat, slightly higher above his own. The result of two years of hard work and a rather nasty scar to prove “loyalty.” 

Boy, that had been quite the argument the first time Axel had seen it. 

He remembered anger so purely then, so perfectly that he might as well have actually felt it as he swore he was going to pay the bastard back for  _ butchering  _ Saïx, and that they were out of here, to hell with anything and everything. What good was any of this if they lost each other along the way? 

It ended when Saïx practically roared at him to get out, scar angry and red and fresh and after a moment of almost genuine surprise, Axel did as asked. 

They didn’t speak for two weeks after that. 

And now here he was, with Saïx playing loyal foot soldier and collecting him for what he could only assume was “disobeying” orders. Axel settled into his chair, slouching deeply. 

Sure, it was all an act (he thought it still was, at least) but Saïx still didn’t have to be so  _ rough  _ about it. 

There were other higher-ups, but Axel paid them little mind; he didn’t care to be scolded by a bunch of old men for not dragging some other poor sap into this. 

He tuned into the conversation in bits and pieces. Xemnas barely spoke and often seemed to speak through others; he was mostly a stern and silent overseer, which was fine by Axel, since he couldn’t look at that face and not see one of the men responsible for his life going to shit. 

It seemed to be the run of the mill stuff; he was tasked with retrieving new members blah blah blah. He’d fire back a dismissive wave of his hand and a casual, “Didn’t see any”; a lie, but he was still young and still thought himself remarkably clever. He would always think that, but time would help cleverness to catch up with his mouth. 

Xaldin opened his mouth to continue to berate him on his slacking or failure or whatever, but the Superior held up a hand and the room fell silent instantly. There was a familiar hiss in the air of the fabric of space tearing from a corridor, and out stumbled the poor sap Axel was supposed to bring back. 

Their not-so-benevolent leader slowly lowered his hood, amber eyes fixing almost slyly on Axel with what, if Axel wasn’t a rational Nobody who knew better, he would call amusement. Of the sadistic sort. 

“Perhaps a demonstration of the consequences for disobeying would be enough to… motivate you further next time.” His voice was cool and calm, as if each word was deliberately chosen. “Fortunately, this one does not seem worthy of our ranks and is therefore expendable for this demonstration.” He slowly raised a hand, a bright light forming in it that twisted with darkness around the edges: the strange power of non-existence the Superior wielded. For a moment, Axel wondered if it would be directed at him. 

Well. It had been a comparatively shitty run of things, so this might as well be it. 

He braced for a hit that never came, and instead heard a bloodcurdling scream below him. He bolted upright in his chair, looking down at the floor where the new Nobody stood as they contorted in pain. They curled in on themselves in an attempt to brace, but an unseen force pulled them out with audible sounds of bones cracking and rearranging, moving beneath flesh unnaturally as limbs stretched and bent at nauseating angles. 

Axel had to cover his mouth and close his eyes tightly to avoid the ice cream he had just eaten on the clock tower from rapidly coming back up at the sight and the sounds. 

Worlds, the  _ sounds.  _

Even with his eyes shut he could only imagine. The screams became less and less human sounding before ending in a harsh, unnatural  _ zip.  _

What must have been less than a minute felt like an eternity, and when he slowly, regrettably cracked open his eyes and looked down, he didn’t see a humanoid figure there.

He saw a Dusk. 

Writhing bonelessly and devoid of any facial features. 

His blood ran cold. 

He sat up razor straight, and for a moment he was quite glad he was wearing gloves, so they couldn’t see his white-knuckled grip on the arms of the chair. 

His ears were ringing, but even through the ring and even though everything sounded muffled and far away (and in this moment he was glad he didn’t have a heart because it would surely leap clean from his chest), he heard the Superior say: 

“Behold the price of failure.” 

  
  


* * *

  
  


Axel wasn’t sure if he became the Organization’s designated assassin out of talent or punishment. 

Either way, he was quite good at it. 

It hadn’t been long after that…  _ display _ that he had been tasked with his first assignment of the killing sort. Guess they figured he’d been less inclined to protest with the newly revealed, ever present threat of what was left of his being twisted and his consciousness dying and forced to—

He shifted trains of thought before that one went careening off a cliff. 

There was something awful about making a kid who had barely crossed the threshold into adulthood the designated assassin of this little outfit. Then again, if Axel was going to start making a list of grand atrocities committed by the Organization, this would probably rank solidly in the middle. 

He sulked through the old mansion of Twilight Town. They said he’d know the target when he saw it, but that just seemed like cryptic bullshit to him because he had been here for an hour, tracing empty dusty rooms and stepping in creaky floorboards. 

At the current moment in time Axel had, once again, no intention of following orders. 

Or… he didn’t think he did. He didn’t know. Frankly, he was hoping for the option of the  _ whatever  _ never showing up so it was a non-issue. Because Axel knew two absolute truths: 

  1. He didn’t want to kill _anything._
  2. He couldn’t not kill _something._

If only because he was told to and he had already been shown what disobeying the Organization meant, and quite frankly that was so…  _ so _ much worse than just dying. Every time he thought about it a whole body shiver ran through him… which was a neat trick for someone who couldn’t feel. 

He finally heard something when he walked by the door to the basement. By this time, he had just taken to pacing the already worn floor with an impressive amount of anxiety. Or memories of anxiety. Ah, fuck it. 

There was a creek of floorboards below him and an audible, otherworldly  _ groan.  _

Well. Mansion’s haunted. 

Sure, the local kids called it the haunted mansion but, well, kids always thought mysterious off-limits places were haunted. When they were younger, he and Isa thought the castle was haunted. Especially when you could hear what sounded like wailing at night and—

Okay, bad example. 

Axel squared his shoulders, standing up straight to brace himself as he slowly opened the door to the basement. It was dark, so he remedied that with a soft snap of leather-covered fingers. Fire sprang to life at the tips of them as a makeshift lighter as he slowly walked down the stairs, mindful of every creak and groan of floorboards and not-floorboards. 

The flames cast long shadows in the now-dimly lit room, making his own shadow look a bit ghoulish in the low light: tall and thin like something that was a mockery of human. Almost but not quite. He turned away from his shadow quickly before he could give it much more thought. 

And came face to face with something that was definitely not human. 

Axel had never put much thought to if Nobodies could come out wrong. 

He guessed he’d always supposed that you either came out on the other side of this as either human-looking or not-human-looking (thinking of himself as not actually human was still a struggle really). He didn’t think that you could catch yourself in between somehow. 

Surprise. 

There was a sick irony in finding out that you could find yourself a Nobody, a thing caught in the in between—Existence and Non-existence, darkness and light—nd then find yourself evidently stuck between humanoid and… not. 

The thing in front of him certainly couldn’t be mistaken for human. 

He wondered what caused it. Did they realize their heart was gone, that they had died halfway between heart separated from body and waking as a Nobody, and it cracked them like an egg? Is that was caused a Nobody to be born like the one he was looking at now? 

Because that was quite a sight. 

The form on the floor of the basement in front of him, dimly illuminated by the light of the fire on his fingertips, was something vaguely human in form, but its spine was twisted at an unnatural angle, almost as if it was made of some sort of elastic material. Axel recognized it as the same rubbery substance the lesser Nobodies were made of. Its shoulders were almost hunched, and he wasn’t sure if that was from pain or if it was just… like that. One leg was long, rubbery, and pointed and the other was… clipping through the floor? Interesting. One arm was human and the other was long and twisted, with what appeared to be blades all down the arm. 

A very morbid part of him wanted to crouch down and examine further. The sensible part of him that clung desperately to memories of emotions and the existential terror of was whatever the fuck he was looking at right now wanted to get out of here and not look back. Hell, maybe even burn the mansion down. Would solve his dilemma. 

The creature before him had half a face. Fitting, since it was caught between two stages of being. Even if it was ghoulish to look at half features and half smooth nothing. 

Axel winced, unsure what to make of the sight and not wanting to linger here, but unable to look away. Like looking at a train wreck. Then to make matters worse, he swore he could hear it talk. 

_ H… _

His eyes widened and he looked intently at the creature. He swore he heard a sound, but he hadn’t see the half-mouth move. 

_ Elp…. _

It took his a second to realize the hushed, barely audible wheeze of a whisper wasn’t coming from lips but from somewhere else. He didn’t want to dwell on that as he let the light on his fingers die, slowly taking a step back as light sprang into the room again when he summoned his weapons in wheels of fire. 

_ M… _

Metal collided with worn concrete so hard he had to yank the blades back out again with enough effort to almost sending him stumbling back. Before the metal hit the floor it had sliced through tangible yet malleable, like cutting through jelly. The sensation was going to stay and haunt him for quite a bit as he looked down at where the creature once lay. In its place was a bit of blood and a writhing mass of darkness, and Axel didn’t want to look at it—but he couldn’t not look at it. He couldn’t not look at it and see what all Nobodies were underneath. 

Barely a body. Barely anything more than tendrils of darkness leaking out of what once was a being. 

He watched as, to his surprise (remembered, but still) the mass of darkness melted off the shape and didn’t just melt into the earth without a trace. No—instead, it fell off a form like a curtain and revealed a Nobody, but not like the twisted half-form he had just put out of its misery. This one seemed like something. Something not human, but something. 

Axel slowly crouched down. He was getting taller; an unconventional growing up, but still growing. Bright eyes examined in the dim light. 

It looked like the Nobodies that weren’t them, that weren’t the Organization. The ones who couldn’t close their eyes (they usually didn’t have eyes…) and pretend they were human. He wondered how this one almost made it to passing as human. He wondered if that was better or worse somehow. Instead, the poor thing was now squarely in the lesser camp, but… different. He had never seen one like this before. It writhed slowly, looked at him with its featureless face, and sunk into the ground, vanishing from sight. 

Okay. He was getting the hell out of here. 

Without further preamble, Axel swiftly stood and made his way back up the stairs. He wasn’t going to open a corridor down here and have who knows what follow him inside. But as he walked up the stairs, he swore he heard a strange sound. Like something was… swimming? The sound of water parting around a form, almost but not. He cautiously took a step. 

That sound. 

Another step. 

Another sound. 

Upon reaching the top of the stairs, he whirled around to look behind him and there, with its head barely poking up out of the steps somehow, was the creature. It appeared to have sunk itself into the floor, like moving through solid concrete and wood was nothing. 

Axel took a slow step onto the next rung of the stairs and the creature followed. 

This patterned continued, and he was now completely convinced this thing was following him like some sort of lost puppy. 

“Hey,” he finally said to it, narrowing his eyes. “No, I put you out of… whatever misery  _ that  _ was, and you shouldn’t even still be here so we’re square. Shoo.” He waved a hand dismissively at the creature, but it didn’t move. He was pretty sure he was supposed to kill this thing, and instead it was following him home. Great. 

After about an hour, he had finally given up trying to get the creature to stop following him, and deemed his best option was just to return with it in tow and try his very, very best to explain what exactly went wrong. 

_ Well, I did run it clean through. Next time  _ ** _you_ ** _ can have the pleasure of feeling your weapon cut through living tissue or whatever the fuck that was, Superior, because I want no part of that ever again. _

Sure. That would win him points. 

To his utter and complete surprise, no one seemed particularly put off by this dilemma. In fact, they seemed be almost  _ pleased,  _ as if they had been expecting him to find some sort of existential horror and to return with… this. 

The creature stood behind him rather obediently, and quite frankly it was creeping him out so much that he almost missed the Superior’s long winding dialogue on Nobodies and different makes and levels of such, and how they were slowly discovering new higher Nobodies by the day. Not quite Organization-level of strong, but also not dusks. They were more specialized: the evolutionary link between the humanoid Organization and dusk. 

Seemed like he had discovered a new form of higher Nobody. It also seemed this wasn’t completely unexpected. If he didn’t know any better, he would swear this was all an elaborate plot to traumatize him.Though he had no heart, it still felt rather pointed in a way. He wondered if Saïx got similar treatment. Their time to talk freely was few and far between, stolen and quick. 

He snapped back to attention when he heard Xemnas address him directly, congratulating him on a job well done (imagine that) and telling him this newly discovered form seemed to have taken a particular liking to him. Much to Axel’s chagrin. 

They called them assassins. 

  
  


* * *

Things got easier with time. Maybe the longer he spent as a Nobody the farther away from his human self he got. That was a thought. A distantly, remotely  _ upsetting  _ thought. Though was it only because he believed he should be upset about losing himself slowly and becoming a numb husk? He wasn’t sure. He had had a good many years under his belt here. Maybe the time was getting to him. 

It wasn’t like he could go to Saïx with this. Saïx had always been rather… realistic about them being Nobodies, and Axel wasn’t in the metaphorical mood to drum up that old existential argument when he did have moments alone with him. 

He’d much rather occupy his time in other ways when he had moments alone with him. 

They’d managed to do an impressive amount of quiet plotting despite their roles here taking different routes. Mostly because fairly early on they had quietly been nudging Saïx closer to Xemnas’ good graces and it had paid off. 

He was getting closer. Closer to that bastard and closer to, with any luck, finding out the truth about their missing friend and how to get their hearts back and go back to their regularly scheduled lives. 

Regularly scheduled as if they hadn’t already spent almost half a decade here. 

Years had come and gone in blurs. Guess they did when you lacked the ability to care about them or the passage of time. Still, there was a distant thought—a mournful thought—that he was wasting perfectly good years of his life here. 

Though he wasn’t sure what he’d do with them if he had them, honestly. He had died at an age when he wasn’t paying much thought to futures or adulthood and responsibility. Still, something gnawed at his guts sometimes. The ghost of mourning a life lost. 

So he threw himself into his work, grim as it may have been. One benefit of Saïx slowly climbing ranks was that Axel enjoyed a level of leniency. He could turn in reports more or less at his leisure and make tiny little comments that showed his underlying disdain without feeling like Saïx was going to rat him out to Xemnas. There was familiarity there. Comfort in the other’s presence even if things could be… fraught. Sometimes. 

Mostly because it felt like there was an ever-growing rift between them. Axel supposed that happened when the moments you saw each other were fleeting and never spoken about: A night together with the other entering unannounced past midnight, and the next day back to business as usual. Collect your mission like nothing ever happened, let gloved fingers brush for just a beat too long…

It was strange, really, to chase physical sensation in lieu of emotions and never speak or hint a word of it. So much of what they did was behind closed doors. Plotting. Talking. Trying to cling to the facsimile of friendship despite both feeling the chasm widening between them with each day. 

Maybe because with each day the memory of emotion got further and further, and they just stopped… caring. 

That wasn’t true. 

They couldn’t care. 

But they both clung fast to the memories, even if Saïx was far less open about it. They clung fast to memories, and at some point in time they just began slipping through their fingers like sand no matter how desperately they clutched at them. 

What would they have when it all slipped away? 

What would they  _ be _ when it all slipped away? 

He was getting closer to finding out, since the only time they spent with each other was fleeting moments, in the hallways or business-like talks about quiet machinations as Saïx moved closer and closer to the top of the ladder.

_ Please talk to me about ANYTHING other than “our” so-called “plans”!  _

Axel wished he could just tell him to call the whole thing off. To hell with the plan anyway, and to hell with this. Who cared about their missing friend anyway? Heartless him certainly couldn’t. She was probably long gone or dead by now. Whatever the truth was, Axel was quite certain  _ she  _ probably wasn’t putting in all this effort to find  _ them.  _

But telling Saïx to call off half a decade’s worth of effort would be close to impossible. Axel would have more success trying to move the entire castle with his bare hands. 

So he kept his mouth shut, even as he felt that rift grow bigger and bigger. The chasm became an ocean with so much hidden beneath its depths. So much hidden in eyes and  _ are your ears different?  _ And  _ where do you  _ ** _go_ ** _ some nights?  _ And  _ talk to me please talk to me.  _

He wondered if Saïx knew he noticed the subtle differences. The way Saïx seemed to act Axel was assuming he didn’t but oh, Axel saw them and wondered. He knew better than to ask because he’d get some non-answer or a question instead. Saïx had an infuriating way of answering a question with another question, and sometimes Axel just wanted to punch his teeth in, but he’d never do it because it was  _ Isa  _ somewhere underneath all that. 

Was he still Lea? 

He liked to think so. 

But each day he felt further and further away from the person he had been as a  _ human.  _ He had spent so much time as Axel that it was becoming all he knew, and that was dangerous; he feared all his memories of humanity and emotions would soon slip away and be nothing but a brief nostalgia in the pit of his empty chest. 

And a part of him, deep down in the echoes of the chasm where his heart should have been, dreaded what might bloom in the wake of his memories of humanity dying and becoming foundation for something… else. 

Half a decade as a Nobody. 

With each passing day that ache in his chest seemed to grow quieter and quieter. 

Like the ticking of a clock. 

What would happen when it struck midnight? 

  
  



	2. Part II

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Years come and go. Plans are made and things change. The first link in a chain.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Fair Warning: Mentions of adult activities in this chapter. Not explicit but there.

Guess he just needed to hit his stride. 

Sure, it took practically a decade, but things seemed to be working out for him. As well as things could, really. 

Alright, that wasn’t  _ completely  _ true. Things with Saïx were still… distant at best, and he still had to do icky missions, but he just found himself… not even pretending to care. 

He’d never say it to his face, because why the hell would he, but Saïx had a point to the whole ‘not even pretending to act like they were still human’ thing. Axel had just taken forever to see it. But he had now, and that meant less headache for him when the memories cropped up. 

Truth be told, the memories of having emotions felt so distant now anyway. Like something he’d dreamed almost. Hadn’t he always been this? Empty? Made of porcelain, so he looked so fine and pristine on the surface, but underneath there were so many little cracks, and if you were to open it up you’d find nothing inside.

Hollow. 

Suited him just fine. Saïx was getting closer and closer to Xemnas; all was going according to the plan that they were still following out of some sort of obligation. 

He was content to just spend his days virtually on autopilot. Do this mission, get some alone time. Maybe manage to coax Saïx away from his desk for once in a literal damn blue moon. The reasons why they did what they did seemed so trivial that he just did them. 

Eventually they would get their hearts back, right? But he’d stopped pining for that moment long ago. 

Still. Card wasn’t off the table. The Superior seemed quite taken about with new recruit…

* * *

Ugh.  _ Babysitting.  _

What about him screamed  _ nanny _ ? 

He spent half the afternoon wondering whose toes he’d stepped on  _ this  _ time. 

This was probably pretty revenge on Saïx’s part for some small slight that Axel couldn’t even remember. Could be anything really. Didn’t even have to be anything that had happened this year. Saïx had a long memory, and that had come to bite Axel in the ass on more than one occasion. 

Here he was, watching the kid run around the sewers of Twilight Town looking for a treasure chest. He wondered if he should help out but hey, if the kid couldn’t find a chest what hope did he have of fighting Heartless? Axel was already questioning this one a little bit. The kid was a practical zombie. Axel had snapped his fingers in front of his face three times before the kid had even  _ blinked.  _

He watched from a higher vantage point so he could see the new kid running around like a mouse in a maze. Target and runner in his line of sight. What was supposed to be so special about this one? Sure, the kid could summon a keyblade, the importance of which only barely registered to Axel since he had gotten quite good at pretending to listen to Xemnas’s speeches, but why was  _ that  _ so important? 

Something something Kingdom Hearts probably if he had to guess. 

Theoretically, you could assume this whole grand goal was to reclaim their hearts. That was the party line anyway, but that would involve trusting Xemnas, and quite frankly Axel did not, in fact, trust Xemnas. 

He didn’t have a heart to believe or truthfully  _ disbelieve  _ anyone but just call it a fe—a hunch. It was stupid. 

But stupid had kept him around this long, and sure, they couldn’t really grapple with intangibles, but he was nothing if not the sum of his ghostly parts.

And that lingering gestalt did not trust anyone. Except maybe Saïx. Though that wasn’t completely true. There was a part of him that didn’t even…

“A… Axel?” 

A timid, distant voice snapped him from his thoughts, and his head immediately swiveled to the source of it. The kid’s voice still sounded like a husk, as if every word was an immeasurable effort because speaking was new and forgein. He wondered if he sounded like that back in the day. He couldn’t remember. It was getting harder to remember  _ before  _ as opposed to  _ now.  _

“What?” he said with a bit of bite, like an older sibling disturbed, though he wasn’t really busy doing anything but getting lost in his thoughts while he was supposed to be keeping an eye on the kid. He could have run out of the sewers and clean into town and Axel probably wouldn’t even have noticed. 

“I… I found it.” Roxas pointed behind him. 

“Alright then, what was inside?” he asked, raising a brow when he saw Roxas’s hands were notably empty, and he was pretty sure the kid hadn’t figured out how pockets worked yet. 

“What…?” Roxas began the question, but he never got to finish it since Axel let out a long exaggerated sigh, getting to his feet with a certain laziness in his bones, towering over the kid. He couldn’t have been more than 16. 

The same age as him when he died… Oh, how the time flies. 

“C’mon,” he said, waving a hand to encourage Roxas along as he walked at a slow and lazy pace through the tunnels. His legs were long, so Roxas had to take twice as many steps to keep up with him. He wound through the corridors with the practiced knowledge of someone who had been here before, and didn’t even look back once to see if he lost Roxas somewhere along the way. He hadn’t, which was lucky on his part. He certainly was not babysitter material. 

Axel reached the chest and turned, gesturing at it. “So, here’s the thing about treasure chests, Roxas. They have stuff in them.” 

“What ‘stuff’?” the kid asked and Axel rubbed the back of his head. Sheesh, were all kids like this? He didn’t remember being this obtuse. 

“Just stuff. Stuff you want, helpful things, cool things; I don’t know. Just open it and find out.” He was recalling impatience fairly well at the moment. Which was interesting, since really recalling anything had gotten duller and duller with time, like a medicine that long since stopped being effective. 

A built up immunity to memory. 

Roxas seemed to have to be convinced of it, which was weird because he was a kid, and didn’t all kids enjoy a certain sense of  _ wonder  _ at treasure and the unknown? Did this kid even remember how to be human? He was so… fresh that Axel didn’t understand how he couldn’t, since  _ he _ vaguely remembered what he had been like. He didn’t remember the ghosts of emotions clawing at the heart-shaped hole in his chest, but he remembered that had been a thing. 

The contents of the chest were a potion. Axel would know because he put it there himself. 

Now that the kid had learned how to open a simple lock, a skill that would surely aid him if he ever chose to become a thief when he grew up, Axel considered his work here done. With his tutelage the kid had acquired skills such as running and opening boxes. Axel stretched out a hand, leather gloves creaking as he already felt the weight of a corridor forming in front of him. The faint tearing sound and the smell of ozone. 

“See? That wasn’t so hard now was it?” he drawled, somewhat mocking — or at least it sounded it. He couldn’t actually mean it. 

“That was easy.” 

Axel barely heard the kid speak; it sounded more like mumbling, so he cupped his hand around his ear. “What?” he drawled. “Didn’t quite catch that.” 

“I said…” the kid started, but he seemed to lose his train of thought before it even had the chance to leave the station. He furrowed his brow so much that Axel was convinced he was going to hurt himself, and was about to say something coy to that affect before the kid looked at him. 

“I could have done that blindfolded,” Roxas finally spoke again as he flashed him a confident, childish grin. “Let’s go back.” He walked forward into the corridor that Axel had opened just moments before, leaving the other Nobody behind. 

He couldn’t be shocked or surprised, but even this far gone the ghosts still whispered through him sometimes. Axel couldn’t help but chuckle a bit, shaking his head lightly. 

“Maybe there’s hope for you yet, kid,” he said as he followed the boy, the portal collapsing in on itself behind him. 

Interesting, that, to go from nothing to a spark of  _ something.  _ He felt like he was the opposite. If his distant memories served, he had arrived with so much and had slowly been emptying out, piece by little piece. Maybe there was a way to fill up again instead of only emptying. 

Except there was a heart-shaped hole in him that promised that even if he could fill again with emotions, they’d just pour out again, leaving nothing behind.

  
  


His life quickly took on a very strange dichotomy. Some days he would spend them as he usually spent them since becoming the Organization’s designated assassin: performing the not-so-niceties of everything that implied. He couldn’t tell you what or why or  _ who _ ; it didn’t matter. He certainly couldn’t feel anything about it either way. Maybe that was where being numb came in handy. 

Otherwise he was certain he’d feel a  _ way  _ about all of this, but as it was he would always come back smelling of fire and darkness and  _ blood, _ and he couldn’t bring himself to care. 

And then other days he was with the kid, the big bad assassin turned de facto babysitter, because worlds knew he was somehow the closest thing equipped for it in this little outfit—which really was saying something. 

After all, they each had  _ tried _ their hand at child care duty (which the exception of Saïx and Xemnas, who weren’t deluded enough to even attempt), and after Roxas came home one day with a big old black eye courtesy of Lexaeus’ dutiful teachings, Axel had actually  _ volunteered  _ to take over again. Heartless or not, the sight of a kid half his age beat up by a  _ full grown adult  _ made something icky twist in his gut. 

He didn’t know what possessed him to invite the kid up to the clock tower. 

It didn’t make sense, really. Why? He had been going there since his first ever mission to Twilight Town, when he looked up at it and thought to himself,  _ That looks like a good place to get away from all of this bullshit for a good hour or two.  _ Twilight Town was very welcoming to his rather abnormal Nobody system compared to most other worlds. They left him feeling  _ wrong,  _ like he hadn’t decompressed from a dive to the bottom of the ocean. No, that wasn’t fair — _ he _ was the thing that was wrong in those worlds. 

Not only was Twilight Town rather good on his system, whatever that may have been, but it also had an ice cream shop that sold sea salt ice cream, which tasted like memories and summer and first kisses and nostalgia so sweet and bitter on his tongue that it caused a painful echo to rattle through him. Like someone yelling into an empty house long cleared of its occupants. 

So, normally after a mission he would grab one, sometimes  _ two  _ in the hopes that he’d get an unexpected—but longed for—guest, and sometimes even  _ three _ if he was “feeling” really ambitious. In honor of absent friends. 

It was quiet and reflective, and he could hide up here and stare out at the perpetual sunset and bask in the quiet and just  _ think  _ without all the noise and expectation. 

What possessed him to invite the kid up here after a mission was beyond him. It just came out, like there was no processing time between brain to mouth. Maybe he was more desperate for any sort of company that wasn’t tangentially “business”-related then he thought. 

He hadn’t been lying when he said the kid earned it. Roxas was proving to be more and more of something resembling a person by the day. The kid had a streak of sass in him that made Axel oh so proud, and he wondered if this was vaguely how parents fee— _ thought.  _

So, he treated the kid to ice cream like he just kicked the winning goal on his soccer game — though taking down a massive Heartless was a lot more interesting in his opinion. 

He had done this once before, actually, though he didn’t really count that in his mind because Roxas certainly didn’t seem to remember it. 

It was immediately after the kid stumbled into being. Xemnas had caught him mid-dark corridor while he was heading to Twilight Town for a particularly long round of hiding from everything and everyone. The sight of the boss man coming at a woefully slacking charge in the middle of the literal darkness unannounced was enough to make Axel contemplate just chucking aside his coat and melting into the darkness.Surely that would be better than any consequence Xemnas could cook up for Axel daring to want  _ breathing room _ in that large-yet-stuffy castle. 

Axel promptly halted that plan when Xemnas revealed a damn  _ child _ behind him, because then he was suddenly so full of memory and ghostly anger that oh, he was glad he couldn’t feel, because it surely would have touched his face, coloring it with horror and rage like ink slowly saturating a paper. 

_ Ventus? _

He never forgot a face, but this one was an impossible face; this face was sixteen when he was sixteen, and Axel was certainly not sixteen anymore. 

“Roxas,” Xemnas spoke, which made Axel snap his head up to look at him and away from the kid, almost as if Xemnas could read his thoughts, hear the gears turning so hard in Axel’s head they were practically smoking. 

“He is our newest.” There was some spark of  _ something  _ like delight in Xemnas’s eyes and Axel’s mind was still going a mile a minute. Was the kid the newest? Unlucky thirteen? Or was he going to be another one of Xemnas’s little “demonstrations” or “experiments”? 

Axel flexed his fingers at the thought, as if he could stand a chance in a fight if it came to it, but hey, he’d go out in a fucking blaze of glory defending a literal child from this _ — _

“His first missions will be in Twilight Town to… ease him in. Show him around,” Xemnas finally finished as he shoved the kid at Axel. Roxas wasn’t expecting it and stumbled, and Axel barely had a chance to catch the poor kid before he tripped and found out what darkness tasted like. 

Kid was a Nobody, so he probably already knew on some level, but still. 

Xemnas walked beyond them and vanished out another corridor before Axel could even get a “What?” to leave his lips. 

So he took the kid around Twilight Town, and by took the kid around he really just brought the kid to the top of the clocktower because he couldn’t think of anything else to do. This was probably all just stalling anyway until Xemnas could dig up the child-sized coats again. Axel had been left to stall like an older sibling while dad put out the presents for the worst Christmas ever. 

He took the kid up to the clocktower and bought him a pity popsicle. “Here’s to the end of your life,” he said dryly as he handed it to the kid, who didn’t move at first. He hadn’t moved much at all really, and when it did it was slow, as if each small movement took everything in him. Heavy in a way. Maybe he was bogged down with still so-fresh memories of emotions, while Axel was light and practically empty. 

He would find out later that was far from the case. 

The kid took the ice cream, not looking at him at all while he did, and numbly ate. Well, this was how it was going to be. Axel sighed heavily and collapsed onto the edge of the tower beside the kid, clapping him on the shoulder. 

“I’m sorry.” 

Because despite all the time and distance he  _ knew  _ what it was like to be both a kid and a Nobody, and it was  _ awful.  _

Axel was far too lost in his own thoughts to hear the kid quietly, like a death rattle, whisper that the ice cream was salty. 

This time, the second time, Roxas had said the same thing again, but he was talking more, whole sentences now. That was a vast improvement, so Axel just laughed, false and hollow, and reminded him that he had said that before. 

He tried to spin things in a positive light for the kid, that this was where it all really began for him and that the future was bright—all the stuff you tell kids when you want to lie to them, because even heartless he didn’t think himself  _ cruel.  _

Not to kids at least. 

Axel, ironically enough, did not find the proverbial heart to tell the kid he was just another gear in Xemnas’ well-oiled machine that was working towards  _ something  _ that probably wasn’t what they all thought it was. But they were already all a part of the machine, so they couldn’t do anything but move forward with it. 

Still, misery loves company and Axel admittedly did not  _ dislike  _ having someone else here to talk to. So he came up with the bright idea to make this a regular thing. Coming here after missions and treating the kid to ice cream and conversation and something resembling the ghost of joy and childhood. It was certainly more than he got way back when. It seemed harmless enough at the time. 

This was where it all really began for him. 

* * *

For a time there was peace, in a way. Something to look forward to, as much as a being without a heart could look forward to anything. There was something oddly comforting about a routine, like it was some magic spell that if you just kept repeating your days exactly as you had then nothing bad could ever come your way. 

He hadn’t had anything resembling a routine in ages. Chaos ran his days mostly, and that suited him in a way, but deep in his bones there was that old  _ ache  _ again. A strange, nebulous longing—for what he wasn’t sure, but it reverberated off his empty shell. 

Perhaps it had something to do with how little he was seeing of Saïx of late. Sure, this had been slowly happening for a while now. Axel would be a liar (he was, but  _ still)  _ if he said he hadn’t noticed. He had. Every little slip further and further away. He had seen it, measured the distance and knew deep down one day what was left of Isa would slip far beyond his fingertips. 

He measured the distance so carefully, and yet it still felt like one day he woke up and there was a chasm between them, and Isa was already gone. 

Axel, being as full of tact as he was, was sure to confront Saïx about it. 

_ What gives? Can’t even spare a “hello” to your friend anymore? You can’t tell me you’re  _ ** _really _ ** _ getting on so swimmingly with fucking Xigbar of all people… _

He was met, of course, with Saïx’s infuriating way of answering questions with more questions; it was so predictable and somehow so very  _ him  _ that Axel never could decide on what mask of emotions to reach for—anger or something else— so he usually let them all fall into nothingness. 

_ You know how my mission went; I wrote your stupid report! Answer the damn question for once!  _

Axel pushed and pushed; he wanted to know why. What was going on; something was wrong and different and it wasn’t just that they were Nobodies, because they had  _ been  _ Nobodies, but there had been something nagging, scratching at the back of his brain about Saïx for quite sometime and he wanted to know  _ what.  _

“Lea.” 

The name,  _ his  _ name, his real name, caused him to stop suddenly mid-sentence. He couldn’t even remember what he was going on about—probably something to do with Saïx being a shitty friend and (are we going to name what else?). The steam, faux or not, left him in an instant as he exhaled. 

“Not here,” Saïx finished and Axel saw as his now amber eyes (the same amber as—) looked down the hallways. He quickly stepped past Axel, and Axel thought that was the end of it before Saïx caught his arm and whispered, “Tonight.” Then he walked away as if nothing had happened, leaving Axel behind to stand there looking and feeling like an idiot in the hallway. 

Despite weeks and weeks of barely talking and snide comments he could only hope were an act for the other heartless denizens of the castle, he still fucking showed up. 

* * *

Here’s the thing about Nobodies. 

A Nobody was what you got when a heart kissed its poor body goodbye and went off into parts unknown, probably to become a Heartless. If the thought of your heart turning into an overgrown, wriggling insect of darkness operating on nothing but the instinct to eat hearts was upsetting, then finding out what became of your empty husk of a body would really do you in.

Your body, heartless,  _ effectively soulless,  _ would—if you were lucky—reanimate still looking and thinking like you. “You” were now just hollow shell moved about by memories like some revenant or monster from a dusty old book talking about the  _ uncanny  _ and went on and on about  _ the horror _ of it all. 

You’d quickly find out that there was something important  _ missing,  _ and that would ache so painfully in the beginning that you’d practically double over with it—and this was when you would learn that yes, there are some things you  _ can  _ still feel. Like pain. You can feel pain. You can feel pain and—

Axel opened the door to Saïx’s room at the designated hour of  _ ass-o’clock— _ when he always would—with a practiced quietness—like he always had—and slipped inside. 

All these precautions were in place because Axel was  _ convinced  _ Saïx thought that between the hours of 12 to 2 AM, Xemnas would haunt the halls like some floating specter— but  _ 3 AM,  _ for some reason known only to Saïx, was completely safe. 

Now, from here this usually went a couple different ways. 

All those ways would usually end the same, really; it was just the semantics that were different. Directions, really. Up or down. That sort of thing. 

There was usually little time to think or react, which was fine with him because all of Axel’s worries about Saïx drifting away always evaporated the second he seemed  _ wanted.  _

What was that other thing Nobodies could still feel? 

Oh yeah...

The distance always felt so small in moments like this. In moments where it was just the two of them, for all that was worth. 

There were few moments anymore where Axel felt truly  _ alive.  _

Fights barely roused him; Heartless were boring targets, and he was good enough as to not usually break a sweat against  _ other targets _ . 

But this… This always made him feel alive because it was so physical in a way that his alien being could still enjoy. It was easy to pretend to be almost human if you could mistake bodily pleasure for emotional feeling. 

It was never particularly gentle sex. 

Hadn’t been in years. Not since they were younger and closer and still clinging to the ghosts of themselves, slowly feeling each other out experimentally. 

Now it was just the ghost of frustration at each other bouncing back between them, all the shared history of a growing separation weaponized in an instant. 

It left bite marks and bruises and deep long nail marks in his back that Axel was surely going to feel in the morning, but at least it was  _ something.  _

He was admittedly half-asleep when the  _ business  _ talk started. He didn’t even register that Saïx was talking to him; he just faintly heard his voice and gave a questioning hum in reply. 

“I said—” Saïx always had remarkably more patience after sex, “I’m going to have you sent to Castle Oblivion.” 

This made Axel slowly crack open an eye and look at Saïx, who wasn’t looking at him but instead away, rather contemplatively, as if the walls would provide answers or were scribbled with some invisible plan Axel couldn’t see. 

“Trying to get rid of me already?” Axel couldn’t help himself from practically purring despite how bone tired he was. “After  _ that  _ no less? You suck at pillow talk.” He couldn’t help but snicker as he lazily snaked a hand down the other man’s thigh before Saïx caught his wrist tightly. 

“ _ Focus,”  _ he gave a small hiss through his teeth, more of a word for both of them really. The grip slacked quickly, but Saïx's grip remained; the contact was admittedly nice.

“Most of the members are set, but I’ve been allowed to choose the others…” This talk of business was already putting Axel to sleep again. 

He already knew what this was about. Saïx wanted eyes and ears on whatever would happen in the other castle. 

“There is something in that castle that Xemnas wants… If we find it—“ Saïx was never more talkative than in the middle of the damn night and about a plan Axel had no idea why they still pretended to care about. 

“Yeah, yeah. The big plan,” Axel drawled, pulling his hand away and lazily waving it dismissively. “Whatever. Just tell me what you need and I’ll take care of the rest.” A flirty little kiss to the cheek to accentuate his point. 

Despite their growing distance, Axel still would do anything for Saïx. 

Besides… He enjoyed the idea of covert little games. Why, he was the Organization’s assassin after all, and he so rarely got to have  _ fun  _ with it. So he’d spy and report and hell, even  _ do away with  _ the other members if it came to it. It would all help Saïx in the end, and Axel had gotten quite good at getting his hands dirty over the years. 

What else could they do but get Saïx to the top and hope he found the answers they were distantly looking for still? 

For now, he didn’t intend to leave this room, so Saïx was going to have to deal with him sleeping here tonight. 

“Thank you, Lea.” he softly heard as he closed his rather heavy eyelids. 

“Anything for you, Isa.” 

* * *

It was something of a shame to have to break off the after-mission ice creams for a bit. He actually had been avoiding telling Roxas until the absolute last second because the thought of disappointing the kid didn’t sit well in his gut, which was interesting since he shouldn’t technically care either way. 

So he promised Roxas he'd be back as soon as this was all over and shipped out to the castle with the team: mostly the old guard and two of the newer set Xigbar had dug up not too long back. Those two had always seemed like trouble. He was squarely in the middle of old and new to round them out; he and Saïx were one part old guard, since they joined right after the first six, and one part new, because they weren't revered like those six.

Well. Maybe Saïx was.

So seeing this was the group, the wheels in Axel’s head immediately began turning. 

_ Ah. I see you, Saïx.  _

Axel anticipated metaphorical mind gears weren’t the only thing that would be turning soon. 

He still didn’t know what the goal of this little outfit was aside from  _ studying the heart  _ because it was always  _ studying the heart, _ and one would think after a decade of this they would actually have learned something. 

There was a second matter of business, one involving the keyblade wielder, which was certainly of interest and cause for some nebulous memory of concern he couldn’t quite place yet. 

They quickly learned that Xemnas had put Marluxia in charge—and by extension lord of Castle Oblivion, as Marluxia was oh-so-keen on telling them. The man remembered ego like no other Nobody Axel had ever met.

Or at least… That was the story anyway. Axel wasn’t completely convinced these orders had come directly from the horse’s mouth, so to speak, and not say—from Saïx. Who no one except Axel would  _ ever  _ suspect of having an  _ agenda.  _

In the room where they gathered to be given news and orders, Axel idly flicked over a king’s piece on the chess board as Marluxia divided up the group by the upper and lower levels of the castle as he saw fit. Casting the higher-up members to the basements below.

Predictable.

That left Axel topside, with a front row seat to whatever chaos was going to unfold here. 

Suited him just fine. He hated being in the nosebleeds during a good show. 

Before he shipped out to the castle, after his meeting with Roxas, Saïx had caught him in the hallway. 

“There are traitors at Castle Oblivion. Find them and eliminate them.” 

He must have been feeling rather confident, since this sort of talk was usually being closed doors. Unless he was pretending to act on orders from the Superior, so before Axel could even really think about it he found himself asking:

“I trust that really came from lord Xemnas himself?” he drawled, taking the empty popsicle stick he had been idly chewing on out if his mouth.

“Does it matter?” 

Axel didn’t have to turn around to know Saïx had raised a brow at him. Axel merely shrugged a shoulder as if shrugging both was too much effort. 

“Not really.” 

Once back in his room, he looked at the whole of the possessions he was bringing, which amounted to a couple spare coats and nothing else, and mulled over Saïx’s words. 

_ So that’s what the angle was.  _

He sighed and rubbed the back of his head. 

_ Least he could have done was tell me how many of them are supposed to be traitors. What a pain.  _

_ Though… _

The thought crept in from the edges of his mind and crawled until it had the spotlight. 

Saïx hadn't said how many so he left it up to Axel’s  _ discretion  _ to find out who. Well in  _ that _ case...

He didn’t feel the smile tugging at his lips, slightly wild as he saw the scope of the game Saïx had set up before him. All that was left was to move the pieces. 

So move the pieces he did. He was quiet when Marluxia gave his spiel, eyes silently scanning the room looking for micro expressions. Little callbacks to memories of emotions. Sure, they had no hearts to speak up, but most of these Nobodies had spent enough years as people that their faces still knew how to react to things they felt they should react to. 

Larxene was surely with Marluxia every step of the way. Whatever their angle was, it was mutua. Figure out one and you figure out the other. 

Vexen was very clearly put off by this turn of events. Axel could see it in the way his eye twitched ever so slightly and he looked like he was going to have an outburst at any second. 

Zexion and Lexaeus both looked unbothered, but Lexaeus always looked big and stoic and unbothered. Zexion might actually be, but he knew better than to show it. Surely there were a million little thoughts running through that head of his. 

Well. 

If Axel was a betting man (and he was), he would put his munny on Marluxia and Larxene.

It was rather obvious, really. No one else would have any cause or need to rock the boat. Numbers four through six were some of the sacred original apprentices of Ansem the Wise; they benefited from sitting oh-so-close to the devil's side.

Still, Saïx didn’t say how _ many _ were traitors, and Axel was the Organization’s honorary assassin, after all. He was supposed to use his  _ discretion,  _ and if he happened to  _ see _ suspicious things, well… He was to act accordingly, and accidents  _ did  _ happen sometimes. 

After all, the keyblade wielder should be coming. 

* * *

So this was Roxas’ Other. 

Axel watched through the nebulous surface of the crystal as the boy that he knew was supposed to be Roxas’ Someone wandered into the castle, lured in through Marluxia’s devices like a spider lures a fly. 

When he was initially told by  _ Marluxia  _ of all people who Sora  _ really was, _ he didn’t know what to think. His face betrayed him in that instant, which was a feat for someone without a heart, and it had Marluxia had seized on it. An amateurish slip;. Axel was far better than that. Though who could blame him after hearing that little nugget of information?

It was rather… unconventional to have Somebody and Nobody exist at the same time. 

Maybe it had something to do with Roxas being  _ special  _ and a  _ keyblade’s chosen _ . Still, Axel wouldn’t know what he would do if suddenly confronted with  _ Lea _ somehow still alive and proof that whatever  _ he  _ was it was just a fallacy; he truly had and was nothing and—

Axel quickly dismissed those thoughts by focusing back on Marluxia’s little introduction. The master of ceremonies welcoming the boy to the world’s greatest show, starring the deconstruction of all you knew and loved. 

He didn’t really understand how the castle worked. 

This wasn’t his first time here; he had been here before, sent on secret little missions to find secret little rooms (and he was still supposed to look for that damn room), but there was something… not quite right about this castle. 

They assumed there were thirteen floors and thirteen basements—assumed, because no one could quite keep it straight. When asked to trapeze the floors and count, everyone came back with a different number. The numbers they settled on was the most recurring set of floors they could muster out of all the seemingly endless combinations.

Axel didn’t know how you would move through it if you couldn’t use the corridors; he felt like you’d just be endlessly going from room to room, hallway to hallway, in an infinite labyrinth of doors. So they used that to their advantage and let the big empty rooms be big empty memory canvases. They unleashed the lab rat in the maze and watched him run himself ragged. 

What they were suppose to glean from this, Axel had no idea. What was the point? They had Roxas to gather hearts and that strange number fourteen kid who joined soon after. At least Xemnas said they were a key wielder; Axel hadn’t actually seen it, but he’d been shipped off to the castle not long after their arrival. 

They already had a kid key wonder. The plan going as intended, running smoothly so far—an accomplishment for this bunch. 

Axel could hear Marluxia talking to the kid now, each word honey-coated poison. It was so dreadfully obvious; Marluxia might as well hang a sign that read “bad guy” right on his coat, but the kid seemed to be eating it up. There was no going back once Marluxia teased the notion of Riku being somewhere in the castle; like a fish on a line, Sora was hooked. 

“C’mon kid, don’t make it  _ that  _ easy for him,” Axel sighed, flicking the glass of the crystal as if that would alert the youth, but it only made the image shimmer before righting itself. 

He wasn’t always the most patient of Nobodies, so he’d wait until Marluxia got done his little spiel and then he’d go see the kid for himself. 

  
  


Nothing motivated like a little cryptic purple prose. 

_ You’ve lost sight of the light in the darkness and you forgot that you’ve forgotten. _

He was quite proud of that, really. To think Isa always accused him of not reading enough; that was damn near  _ poetry, _ and he could see it curl around Sora’s little mind and coax him further into the clutches of the castle. 

_ Sorry, kid. Nothing personal.  _

Sora practically hung on every overtly cryptic word and— 

He wouldn’t allow Sora to wander  _ too _ far down the rabbit hole. After all, he didn’t want anything to happen to Sora; who knew what that would do to Roxas, and Roxas was Axel’s friend. 

Thinking the word always made him realize how foreign the concept seemed until just recently. 

Sure, Saïx was his friend*—at least he still thought so. Sometimes. To be perfectly honest, most days it felt like he was clinging to the  _ idea _ that they were once this so they should still be this. 

(*Friend: a word not usually used to describe the person you were almost always perpetually frustrated with and yet still fucking, but sometimes words fail and vocabularies are thin and un-life is complicated.) 

He should have asked Saïx why the Organization wanted Sora at Castle Oblivion. Probably wouldn’t have gotten an answer though. Why did they need Sora when they had Roxas? The two must have existed in some sort of strange balance, right? 

Axel lifted his gaze to the white ceilings of the castle as if it would have any answers for him. 

He peered down at the kid when he interrupted Marluxia’s little bit just now. Sora looked an awful lot like Roxas. Maybe not in the way that Axel looked like who he was (thinking of himself as a separate entity from Lea like Roxas was to Sora sent his brain headed down a path he dare not walk)—or at least what he’d probably look like if he had been allowed to grow up as a  _ Somebody  _ instead of a  _ Nobody _ . But there was something about seeing Sora that just screamed  _ familiar  _ and  _ Roxas came from here _ . 

Guess he knew what it was like to fight Roxas now. Tangentially. Sure, he threw the fight; Sora clearly wasn’t used to overly cunning opponents aside from the errant cackling megalomaniac. The Organization would be a completely different ballgame for him, and the kid would need to be ready. After all, Sora genuinely seemed surprised when Axel revealed that he was barely even scratched from their fight much less beaten. 

Marluxia’s whole big plan was to use the memory witch, Naminé, to swap out Sora’s memories and implant new ones so Sora would be more… cooperative for the Organization’s purposes, whatever those may be. 

Axel could very clearly see where this could go wrong. 

It paid being a Nobody in some aspects; it meant you didn’t really have the heart to trust anyone. Axel did not trust anyone in this little outfit, and they all should’ve trusted him least of all. 

He played his part well, as if the castle was a stage and he the star player. A few words whispered here and there, a touch of the shoulder. The trickster playing his part and wearing a friendly mask. Watch closely now. It was amazing what people will tell you when they thought you were a sympathetic ear. 

Once you figured out what people needed they were all yours. Lend an ear to their endless whining; treat them like they were in charge and you  _ respected that.  _ Of course Axel would aid in whatever nefarious plan was afoot; sure, he  _ seemed  _ devil-may-care, but he wasn’t like the  _ rest  _ of them; he was on  _ our _ side. He’d moved the pieces and engaged in their little games enough to let them think he’d fit into their plans just fine. 

This was a delicate dance, but he knew he could pull it off. After all, he didn’t toe the party line like Saïx appeared to; he was the everyman, the put-upon employee nearly dead smack in the middle of their number. Seen as a bit of a slacker but still competent. 

He’d wait and see what they would reveal. If Axel had to bet munny (sea salt ice cream didn’t buy itself), he’d wager Larxene would slip up first. 

Marluxia and Larxene were two snakes constantly coiled together. The question now became if anyone else was in on whatever traitorous activities were supposed to be afoot. 

The “Superior” did say it was up to his discretion, after all. 

  
  
  
  
  
  


**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Love me some tasty tasty character dichotomy 
> 
> Thanks as always to amberwing for being a wonderful beta and correcting every time I don't do the ï thing in "Saïx"


	3. Part III

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> And the walls come tumbling down.

Once upon a time, not so long ago, Sora lost his heart and became a Heartless. 

In that instant, things proceeded as what had commonly become known as “normal” in the aftermath of the fall of Hollow Bastion and the destruction of the worlds.

Sora’s heart became a Heartless. 

Sora’s Nobody woke up in Twilight Town. 

Through some sort of power or dumb luck, a quirk of fate, Sora regained his sense of self and returned from being a Heartless — Seemingly put back together again like a nursery rhyme. 

But Roxas remained, and now the two surely existed in some delicate balance. 

A delicate balance that would surely be strained by what they intended to do—were doing in Castle Oblivion. 

Axel had considered that: that if anything  _ bad  _ were to happen to Sora it would probably hurt Roxas too. Their mutual existence was fascinating as much as he could be fascinated and terrifying as much as he could be terrified. 

It was easy to suss out what the traitors’ plan would be. How could it not be? They were practically being handed the keyblade wielder to unmake and remake and point in whatever direction they wanted. A perfect little weapon. Fun-sized. 

He just needed proof. He was  _ almost  _ certain, but he needed a concrete slip of the tongue and he was in. It finally came as Axel predicted. 

“Remember,” he called to Larxene as she took some cards and went to go have her turn playing ball with the kid. “We need Sora if we’re going to take on the Organization.” 

It wasn’t subtle; he cast a very obvious line and waited to see if the fish would bite. 

He found her finger quickly pressed against his lips, which caught him slightly off guard if only because he wasn’t expecting to be touched, but by this point in time she had volleyed enough casual touch in his direction that he was running out of ways to look disinterested. So sure. Why not. One more to the pile. 

He honestly thought she enjoyed the discomfort it brought. Memory or otherwise. 

“I know you’re in on it too,” she shushed, “but keep it under your hood — for now anyway.” She winked and offered a short dismissive wave before vanishing into a Corridor. 

Did she? Well, he was a better actor then he thought. 

That had been a shot in the dark and he was oh so  _ delighted  _ it had found it mark without incident. 

His laugh almost sounded real as it echoed in the now empty room. He wasn’t too interested in the hows and whys as he turned his gaze to the ceiling, as if in disbelief of whatever potential higher powers that be allowed it to be this  _ easy  _ for him. 

“You would have been wise to do the same, Larxene.”

Let the games begin. 

* * *

It was the mission of the members of the upper floors to test and ultimately procure Sora for the Organization's use. 

The lower floors, however; they had a different set of tasks to attend to. 

Axel remembered vividly when he’d first ventured down to the basement and saw  _ exactly  _ what Vexen was working on down there. 

Their resident mad scientist had been put to work on a rather unconventional experiment. It made Axel’s skin crawl every time he was down in the basement observing what everyone else was doing in an effort to suss out potential traitors. 

Axel didn’t know why the replica program was started, but he did know that there was a special kind of awfulness in having to step around what amounted to life-sized, blank dolls or seeing them out of the corner of your eye and swearing that perhaps they  _ moved _ . Turns out that even Nobodies, the unbeings as they were, their own existence utterly and cosmically  _ wrong _ , could still have the sense of uncanny and discomfort at something. Distantly and remembered as it was. 

Was that how humans felt around them? 

Whatever the various plans at play here, one thing was certain: Xemnas wanted a backup plan. 

That had to be what this all was. They already had a keyblade wielder in Roxas, but Xemnas surely preferred to control all the keys on the proverbial ring if given the chance. So here they were. 

Vexen didn’t seem to think Sora was a viable option and took it upon himself to explore other avenues: Namely that the other boy, Riku, had initially been the keyblade’s intended. 

And as luck would have it, the boy had found himself at Castle Oblivion after Sora, as if pulled along by fate. 

Axel had seen the replica shortly after its completion. 

It was an exact copy as far as Axel could tell, which was all the more unsettling since he had originally seen this thing when it was nothing but a blank doll to have memory projected onto in some semblance of life. It already seemed quite taken with the notion that it was the  _ better _ Riku. 

Turns out you only need to be alive for a grand total of five minutes to have an existential crisis. Who knew.

Well. Axel did, but still. 

So here they were after Larxene got her ass handed to her by a literal child, with the old man come up to scold them and demand the chance to send his little experiment on a test drive. Axel didn’t care either way; this was all an elaborate attempt for Vexen to prove himself to Marluxia of all people. Guess the older generation couldn’t take the thought of fading from relevance. 

As long as the thing didn’t actually hurt Sora. Axel didn’t know what they would be allowed to do, but he would remain watchful nonetheless. Things would be fine. It’d probably be a chance to see just how well Naminé’s machinations were taking hold — though judging from the kid’s increasingly erratic behavior, Axel would say that was going swimmingly as well. 

Still, Vexen seemed quite on edge; Marluxia’s dismissive nature and air of arrogance from being given command was surely eating away at him. For a Nobody, the old man sure was attached to archaic notions of seniority and respect. Like it was something you just got due to age and not earned. Whatever. It was kind of pathetic in Axel’s opinion, but if Vexen was going to throw fits and stir up trouble then all the more power to him. It would just make it easier for Axel to move in the ensuing chaos. 

So he poked and needled and leaned into his perceived role as disrespectful youth. Sometimes all you needed to do was light the tiniest of matches and then sit back and watch the fireworks. 

* * *

Things certainly were getting  _ dramatic _ around here. Naminé did good—if not disturbing—work. Axel should have known Vexen’s little toy Riku was really going to put the kid through the wringer. 

Naminé was precious. Pitiful, but precious. A caged bird that was capable of terrible things. Axel had to respect her in a way: the manipulative martyr. She wasn’t as seasoned as him, and she often found herself played for a fiddle even as she moved the dolls she made of Sora and the replica around. 

She so desperately thought that she could be  _ real _ if Sora saw her as such. It was laughable. They were Nobodies. They couldn’t ever hope to be  _ real _ again. Not without their hearts anyway, and Naminé was such a unique Nobody—not unlike Roxas—that he wasn’t sure even  _ that  _ far-flung goal would work out for her. The poor thing was doomed, but at least she could be useful. 

The work she had done on the replica was that unique brand of impressive and terrifying that she often seemed to occupy. Axel could have done without watching Larxene rough the thing up, puppet or not; it still looked like a kid and  _ screamed _ like a kid. He knew looking away would earn ire, and he could deal without Larxene’s sadism or them questioning why he was so “soft”. So he watched it, with nothing more than a slight wince and a disquieted feeling in his gut. 

When all was said and done and the replica, who before seemed to have something Axel might just dare call a personality if he was feeling generous, now moved and behaved and thought he was the  _ real  _ Riku. Well. Axel might dare call that disturbing. Sure, the replica wasn’t real — less real then him, and Axel wasn’t  _ real _ in the traditional sense either — but the thought of having your already near-empty husk, what little semblance of self you had, completely overwritten set off an uncomfortable chain reaction inside him. He was quite glad that the replica had run off into parts unknown following its battle with Sora, because quite frankly Axel didn’t want to look upon it anymore. Best bury that experiment and move the hell on. 

Vexen did not take the loss of his experiment well. Marluxia took it even worse. 

Axel tuned in and out. Sure, Vexen was obnoxious and reminded him singlehandedly of every teacher he ever hated in life, which was an impressive feat because his education stopped at sixteen along with his life but—semantics. Marluxia threw around words like  _ failure  _ and  _ disappointment _ so much that Axel could see Vexen slowly turning red. He was sure to pop a blood vessel at this rate, and Axel knew the numerical ladder discussion was coming because it was all numbers to Vexen. Like they actually  _ mattered _ . Axel wasn’t convinced Xemnas gave a shit about any of them (literally, metaphorically, spiritually), much less what number they were in this little outfit. Hell, Saïx was just one number ahead of him and that didn’t seem to matter. Axel sure as hell would never see Xigbar doing any sort of administrative duties. 

Axel’s attention was brought back to the conversation when Marluxia mentioned reporting this failure to the Superior unless Vexen took care of Sora. 

What. 

_ Why? _

That didn’t make any damn sense. He felt his eyes narrow slightly in Marluxia’s direction, as if that would help him see his angle better. Why would he want Vexen to destroy Sora? It had to be baiting him. It had to be a setup, because Axel was certain Marluxia’s plan was to use an empty Sora as a weapon he could just point and pull the trigger. This had to be in the hopes that Sora would destroy or incapacitate Vexen… Which was… an  _ extremely  _ risky little gambit. 

Well, one thing was for certain: Either Marluxia was an idiot or he had lost his damn mind. 

Nothing like giving someone with an ego power and then watching them fuck everything up with it. Thanks for this one, Xemnas. Bastard was probably back in the main castle catching up on his beauty rest while Axel had to be here dealing with this bullshit and making sure no one killed an actual child. 

Once Vexen had cleared the room to take to his task, Axel couldn’t help but speak up. 

_ Are you out of your damn mind?  _

“You can’t give a challenge like that to Vexen; he’ll actually do it,” was the  _ softened _ version of what just went through Axel’s head in response. 

“That would be an unfortunate development, wouldn’t it?” Marluxia didn’t even move a muscle on his face in response. He just went over to Naminé, baiting her to ensure her precious little hero lived up to task. 

Axel narrowed his eyes. 

If Sora ended up hurt, he probably wouldn’t be the only one. 

The pieces were moving erratically, and Axel didn’t like it one bit. Sure, he enjoyed a little chaos, but this was hitting too close to dangerous territory here. His suspicions were quickly confirmed with Vexen’s continued actions. They all watched him try and fail to fight Sora, and then pulleda very problematic card from his sleeve. That idiot was getting dangerously close to spilling all the family secrets. 

What would happen if Sora found out about Roxas? 

Both of them technically shouldn’t even  _ exist  _ at the same time as the other. 

Would Sora disappear? 

Would Roxas disappear? 

Either way, that would be objectively terrible and it would be terrible for the Organization’s plans. Axel was quick to say as much. Maybe if he  _ gently _ reminded Marluxia that this whole operation hinged on Sora being not-dead or vanished then maybe he’d do something. 

_ Hey, quit lording over us for five minutes and realize that all of this is about to go to shit because you decided you wanted to push the old coot off the edge.  _

Axel knew where this was heading; he saw this gambit five steps ahead. There were few other moves, and he honestly couldn’t tell if this had been Marluxia’s intention all along or if he was just in the throes of a power trip. 

Vexen needed to go. Like right  _ now _ . 

His hands itched. He twitched them slightly. 

Axel was an assassin. He had done that job on a quite number of things at this point, but he had never taken out another Organization member. They were just thirteen. Any blow to their numbers would be significant, and sure, he had been tasked to find and eliminate traitors but he was fairly sure Vexen wasn’tone of them… Still… No one needed to know that, and he needed Marluxia’s trust. Vexen  _ was  _ moving erratically and potentially disturbing the Organization’s plans now with this little move of his. 

He knew what Marluxia was going to ask of him before it even left the other man’s mouth. He was already halfway to opening a dark corridor.

He told Marluxia that there would be no taking back what he was just asked to do. 

You can’t hope to control a wildfire after you strike the match. 

* * *

When Axel arrived in the simulated Twilight Town, he already knew where to go. He went to the place where he knew Roxas had entered the worlds. 

He crouched low behind the bushes just before the mansion. He could see Sora and his friends and Vexen. Axel had to hand it to the kid; he had done a number on the old man. No wonder he was so desperate.

When he heard Vexen slowly beginning to reveal Marluxia’s plan, Axel got to his feet. 

Sure, he could have done it at  _ any _ time, but right before Vexen was about to spill all the secrets, just enough to get Sora to  _ doubt _ the memories they were putting inside his head? That was a much more interesting time. Plant seeds so the kid didn’t blindly walk straight into Marluxia’s waiting arms. 

Axel summoned his chakrams into being, idly twirling them once, twice, in preparation. 

Should be right about….

“Marluxia?” Sora’s voice rang out, questioning all he had just heard, “What does he have to do with Nam—“

_ Now. _

Axel almost casually hurled one of his weapons; it was a direct hit, whirling close to Sora enough for him to feel the heat of it as it passed and for the weapon to find its intended target with ease. 

Sora turned to look at him in shock. Not surprising, but he was doing the kid a favor. He should thank him, really. If Vexen kept on like this, if he  _ really  _ got to telling Sora about the proverbial other side, who knew what would happen? 

It would probably be a little… traumatic. Especially when Vexen began to beg for his life, but Axel was generous enough to keep this all sort and sweet. 

A quick snap of the fingers. 

Flame and smoke and then… nothing. 

By now he was well-acquainted with the smell of singed, burning darkness. 

So he might have traumatized the kid, but at least he didn’t drag it out like Larxene surely would have.. Clearly he was the lesser evil in this entire outfit, and that was saying something.

“What  _ are  _ you people!?” 

Axel’s gaze moved from the fleeting, burning remains of Vexen back to Sora, who was staring at him with anger, horror, sadness? Axel wasn’t sure what to name them all, wasn’t sure if he could anymore. They seemed vaguely… foreign to him, like a language he couldn’t parse. One he used to speak, but just faded away from years of disuse. 

Sora’s words did manage to strike home though. Managed to navigate through the vast void of nothingness and find home in the dead space where a heart should have been. He felt a tinge of… something… Some distant memory of emotion…. Some distant memory of a  _ negative  _ one. 

His gaze lowered, as if for a moment this kid before him was some judge and he was the very guilty party before the court. 

“I’m not too sure myself…” he found himself admitting as he vanished into the darkness. 

He had to get away from those eyes. 

* * *

He returned to accolades and Larxene’s arm draped around his shoulders because personal space didn’t seem to be in this woman’s vocabulary. Well, if they’d had doubts about his apparent loyalties then his oh so easily disposing of another member seemed to silence them. 

The fatal words: “taking over the Organization will be child’s play with the three of us,” purred with the illusion of comradery. The lie that one was in likeminded company. 

Bingo. 

“So that’s where Sora comes in.” He needed to be absolutely sure, after all. 

There would be no stopping this once the match was struck. 

Hell, it already had been struck the moment he killed Vexen. 

Axel knew it was a slippery slope. Zexion and Lexaeus surely would not be pleased. They still clung to the illusion that since they had all been apprentices as Somebodies, it  _ meant _ something. That the Organization  _ meant _ something. That they were something of a  _ family _ , or at least had lines one did not cross. 

They were Nobodies. They didn’t have the hearts to prevent them from crossing any lines. That wouldn’t stop them from reporting his activities, however, and Axel rather not have Xemnas questioning his actions. Especially because of where that thread could lead if pulled. 

Perhaps their other guest would take care of it for him. 

Axel was fully prepared to walk out of here the last one standing if it came down to it. It would be five people less standing between Saïx and the top. 

Axel had played his role for now, so he’d sit back and watch until these pieces needed a little nudge, a guiding hand to keep them on course and let the game play out. 

Marluxia’s plan was working a little  _ too _ well. Sora was growing increasingly erratic. Nothing mattered anymore but Naminé. Finding Naminé. Saving Naminé. Naminé Naminé Naminé. 

And the kid thought Axel was twisted. 

His companions had abandoned him. Unsurprising when they were getting yelled at by a teenager in the throes of a tantrum and obsession. 

Axel watched through the crystal. Larxene and Marluxia had gone off to parts unknown to do whatever brand of celebrating snakes do when they feel they have coiled so perfectly around their prey and are preparing to strike the final blow and fill it with venom. 

So that left him with Naminé. 

_ Go get ready for the big moment; I’ll watch the kid. It’s the  _ ** _least_ ** _ I could do, after all! _

They were so easy. Too drunk on the notion that they were so close to the finish line. 

That’s when all the best tripping happened. 

He watched the glass carefully as Sora’s friends abandoned him. He glanced at Naminé out of the corner of his eye and saw her curl up in on herself, as if she knew the turmoil she’d caused. 

Time to open the cage and kick the baby bird from the nest. 

He walked over lazily, with the slow confidence of someone who didn’t feel they needed to hurry — the pieces would still fall into place — and leaned over to peer at what the girl was drawing. 

“You’re all he’s got left now, you know…” he practically sang, leaning on the back of her chair. He saw his bait had been taken when Naminé sat up straighter, “So if you don’t stop this…” he mused casually, taking his time, “No one will.” His voice grew serious then, gravity returning to rocket the truth back down to the atmosphere. 

They played a dangerous game, and now the only one who could fix it was Naminé. 

“But I…” Her voice was so small and weak Axel truly believed he could let out a breath too strong and she’d fly away like dandelion seeds. 

“I don’t see Marluxia around anywhere, do you?” He knew her question before it was even asked as he exaggerated looking for the other Nobody. 

Naminé took his words to the heart she didn’t have; he was glad he didn’t have to coax her more as he watched her run for the door he’d left unlocked for her. Poor thing never could master the corridors. 

As the door clicked shut, he made sure she could hear his final advice:

“Just make it count.” 

He waited a couple moments. One beat. Maybe two. Until the tiny pitter-patter of sandals was a distant memory to the hallway outside. 

Axel pushed off the back of Naminé’s chair, standing up straight with a renewed vigor as he went back to stare into the crystal ball and saw Naminé running down the hallways. 

“Now  _ this  _ should be interesting!” he said aloud to the empty room. They were coming upon the main event now and dare he say he was  _ delighted  _ to see it all play out. 

He idly flicked the glass and the surface shimmered to show Sora, running ahead alone. 

“I do hope you’ll all put on a very good show for me. It’s the  _ least  _ you could do for me, you know.” 

After all, he had done  _ so  _ much to help Sora; the kid owed him a good finale to this little show. 

A chuckle escaped him, like an exhale of breath—but then continued, becoming a _laugh_, one that began in his gut and moved to his chest and out of his mouth, one that _came_ from somewhere, one that didn’t start in his mind and emerge like a death rattle. 

He honestly,  _ truly  _ laughed. 

When he realized it he stopped suddenly, a hand going over where his heart should be, like he’d just been caught doing something he shouldn’t. 

Was he... Was he  _ enjoying  _ this? 

A bit morbid, but he’d worry about that later. He was  _ enjoying  _ this. 

Was it Sora? Something about the keyblade? He hadn’t felt anything close to an emotion in a decade and even the memories of them slipped sometimes. 

Should he have been disturbed that his first faint surge of emotion in ten years was this? Nah. It was probably fine. Who cared anyway? It was a  _ feeling _ , and he’d gladly reach out to grasp it firmly in his hand, morally good or ill. 

Did morals even matter to a Nobody? He’d long since shed them like an old skin. They all had. 

He’d have to thoroughly thank this little cast of characters, though, for making this all such a  _ delight.  _

* * *

Larxene went a lot easier than he thought she would honestly. Guess she was all thunder and no spark. 

It was all coming crumbling down; the best laid plans of mice and men… Well, Nobodies. Surely Marluxia thought only moments ago that he would win the day. Now his accomplice was gone and it was just him with Sora privy to his little plan and surely coming for him. 

Axel didn’t want to give Sora the chance to do anything about Marluxia. Why should he? Let the adults handle this. He wasn’t going to let a kid do his dirty work (the fact that the kids just so happened to do  _ some  _ of his dirty work was a coincidence). 

Besides, he thought it would be quite fun to take down Marluxia himself. Really let him know who flicked the first domino in the chain before the end. 

Axel knew where he’d be. Taking hold in the highest room of the castle. The cornered king retreating to the tower. All the better to fall from it. He made his way up, actually walking a few floors for the hell of it with a certain spring in his step. 

They were reaching checkmate, and finally this mission would be over and he could go back to his regularly scheduled not-life. 

Marluxia threw around words like  _ nerve  _ and  _ treasonous.  _ Some people—even Nobodies—had no self awareness. It didn’t really matter to Axel what Marluxia thought of him; Marluxia would be dead soon anyway, and the opinions of a soon-to-be dead man meant little to him. 

The other man bemoaned the loss of the keyblade wielder, his plans all gone awry. Marluxia’s mourning at the loss of what would have amounted to a child slave made Axel’s fingers twitch, and for a moment he saw himself just striking Marluxia down now with little preamble. 

There wasn’t really a part of Axel that could be disgusted or morally outraged, so the fact that he conjured a rather pure, sudden image of an unpremeditated action was an interesting trick to pull off. 

He instead opted to tune out Marluxia until he heard him cease speaking. Right. The big plan. He recited it back perfectly, every detail as he had figured it out. Did he get all of that right, Marluxia? Because this plot made him the traitor, not Axel. 

Though. 

Technically…

That was a matter for another time. Right now it would serve Axel well and it would serve Saïx well, if Axel was the hammer of the Organization here. If he struck without mercy and weeded the garden of the snakes. 

“You can’t really  _ blame _ me you know,” Axel drawled, not even pretending at emotions at this point. Axel was never more of a Nobody than when he had to do his job. 

Once, Marluxia had accused him of behaving like he was still human. Marluxia wouldn’t be making that mistake now. 

His weapons came to his fingertips in a whirl of fire, spinning once, twice to get familiar with the weight of them once more. He widened his stance to hold his ground, curious who would strike first. 

Marluxia seemed amused, as if he knew he was the more skilled of the two, but there was a good chance it was all ego. He was the type who always fancied himself a competent fighter. Hard to say if it was all show or if there really were thorns behind all those petals. Guess Axel would find out. 

There was a blur of motion, but Axel could move just as quickly, if not quicker. No one else in the entire Organization was a quick as Axel. Perhaps Larxene had been close, but evidently not close enough because Larxene was dead. The air was quickly filled with the smell of roses, then of  _ burning  _ roses. Charred petals fell in little dying embers all around. 

Metal clashed; blows were struck; blows were blocked. A savage dance of metal and fire. Axel had to admit, a  _ challenge _ was always thrilling to his non-existent heart, ike someone had blown onto a dying kindling long enough to make a quick  _ spark.  _

Sora had been a good opponent for a kid; he’d be great when he was older, but there was a different delight to be had in fighting Marluxia, because Axel did not have to hold a single thing back. 

He had been oh so careful with the kid, despite what Sora surely thought. Axel couldn’t let him think it wasn’t real, after all! But he certainly hadn’t intended to harm Sora, just rough him up a bit. They needed Sora alive. Roxas probably needed Sora alive too. 

Marluxia, however, did not need to be alive, and had evolved into an obstacle to clear. Axel’s only (minimal) regret was that Saïx wasn’t here to get in on the fun. 

Fire burned skin that bled darkness as much as blood. Metal cut flesh. A give and take, tides ever turning, and it was a  _ delight.  _ He’d attack from the front and throw one of his chakrams to ricochet off the wall to injure from behind. For a moment Axel was quite certain he was winning, until Marluxia managed to get some distance and in that distance a dark corridor sprang. 

Oh. 

Of  _ course.  _

Axel let out a full body groan when Marluxia plucked Naminé from the darkness with the careless cruelty a child rips a flower from the earth, roots and all. 

“Using her as a shield?” Axel mocked, venom on his tongue, “You think that will stop me?”

Moreso because Marluxia was too cowardly to finish this one his own, not out of concern for Naminé’s well-being. And people said Axel played dirty. 

He wondered if the Organization would be less than pleased over the loss of Naminé. Her powers were useful, but ultimately she, like all of them, was just a pawn to be moved around Xemnas’s board, and Xemnas was known to care little for the sacrifice of pawns. 

“I wonder…” Marluxia mused, as if he had some great card up his sleeve to reveal and was taking great delight in turning it over. “You’re listening, right, Sora?” he called behind Axel. 

A sigh escaped Axel’s lips as he relaxed his stance, all the tension momentarily leaving. He glanced at Sora from the corner of his eye to see the boy looking at him aghast and then in rage, summoning keyblade to hand and gripping it so tightly his knuckles were white. 

“Oh come on,” Axel sneered in disbelief. Had Marluxia really pulled it off? Had Sora become nothing but a puppet moved along by the desire to save Naminé, emptied of everything else? “You can’t be his pawn already, kid — I had more faith in you then that!” It wasn’t a lie, as much as Nobodies could have faith. 

“Once I finish you, he’s next!” came Sora’s battle cry. Were they so far removed from humanity now that this kid saw no harm in killing them? Were they just nameless, faceless monsters that looked human enough but weren’t quite so the folks at home didn’t have to worry about such things as  _ morality  _ or  _ accountability _ ? The nice little grey area between human and monster that made it okay to kill? 

Well, Axel had no intention of dying today, much less to a child. 

He sighed up at the ceiling before turning his gaze back to Sora. “Hey Sora,” he drawled. “We got more in common then you might think.” He watched the surprise, confusion, and ultimately disgust form on the kid’s face, like ink staining paper, little droplets of emotions one after the other. He knew what the kid was thinking.  _ How could a murderer like him be anything like me? _ Well, you’d be surprised. 

There was such dead-set determination in Sora’s eyes, his gaze unwavering, grip twisting slightly on the hilt of the keyblade. There would be no talking Sora out of this, but Axel loved to talk so he’d try anyway. 

“I’d really rather not fight you…” he drawled, his posture relaxed in contrast to Sora’s wound tight. If he had to fight Sora then why not make a show of it? Maybe Axel wouldn’t be the one to strike the killing blow on Marluxia, but there was something beautifully  _ poetic  _ in the would-be puppet doing it instead, and Axel would certainly like to watch. He lined up the pieces so well that they moved themselves now, and the maestro was looking forward to watching this symphony come to a close without his direct hand. He could just lazily dance a finger along and Sora would end Marluxia and Riku would make work of those left in the basement, and well, by the end of all of this Axel just might be the only man standing. 

Why not make his grand exit from the orchestra in a blaze of glory? 

A faint chuckle escaped him like a death rattle. Their laughter never did sound authentic — with the exception of earlier, when these games actually elicited something  _ genuine.  _ He was going to hold onto that for a long time. 

Axel looked back at Sora, manic glee in his eyes and a grin that spread like wildfire, dangerous and toothy enough that Sora reeled back a step. He’d just opened a Pandora’s box and now all the wickedness was bleeding out. 

Weapons sprung to eager hands, and he laughed. “But I do have a reputation to think of!” 

* * *

_ Ow.  _

Axel poked at a tender spot in his side, curious, masochistic fingers examining the depth of the rapidly growing bruise with a morbid fascination. He was pretty sure it hadn’t cut, but he also didn’t much like to look at what twisted mix of substances leaked from him when he did bleed, so he’d put off a thorough examination for as long as possible. 

Sora hadn’t been pulling punches in that last fight even if Axel had been. Was the kid always this bloodthirsty, or was that something they had caused with their meddling into the fragile territory of a young heart? 

Not like the Organization didn’t have  _ experience  _ taking kids and turning them into killers. 

Axel managed to slip away, but not before taking several real and painful hits. Well. At least the pain was something — a tangible thing to hold onto when you often felt like you were walking through some purgatory like a ghost. 

He’d conjured up his dark corridor under his feet, slowly forming the black mass to appear to swallow him up in mimicry of a fading, dying Nobody. Sora had to think him dead for now so he could be free to wrap things up here. Didn’t need the kid to come back looking for him after Marluxia was dust. 

Axel couldn’t leave, however, without one last little word. 

_ “It was worth saving your hide after all!” _

The look of confusion on Sora’s face was enough really, watching the gears turn. Sora had never had to deal with anyone more morally complex than a mindless, feral Heartless. Dangerous animals that needed to be put down before they ate the hearts of good innocent people. 

Sora wasn’t ready to face the Organization as opponents. 

Sora was half of Axel’s friend, and Axel had taken it upon himself to make sure that no matter what plans of the Organization, he could stand to keep Sora alive through them. Keep Roxas alive through them. He’d twist the reasons later, tying them into a neat bow of, “We  _ need  _ the keyblade wielder, don’t we?” 

The kid was young and the world had yet to show its claws. Sure, a world destroyed was terrible, and he was still searching for his lost friend, but there had been an  _ innocence  _ to that journey. The lines were so clear: good, evil. Gray hadn’t even entered the spectrum. 

Sora finally mustered the courage to ask Axel what he meant. They all had just been enemies so far, obstacles in the way of a goal as Sora had gone about this linear journey with the efficiency of a machine, . door to door, room to room. He hadn’t questioned much about these strange (to his knowledge) people that were his enemies here, even as he struck one down and intended to strike down more. 

Was the rage finally being quelled? Was he realizing that perhaps things were more complicated than they seemed? That these weren’t childish games of good and evil made plain anymore? 

Axel only let out a ghost of a laugh, more exhale or air from bruised ribs than laugh. A worn, but still endlessly amused smirk danced across his lips. 

“ _ Sorry, I’d hate to kill the suspense!”  _ He faded into his dark corridor then to the distant sound of Sora calling after him.

And that ended act one. 

* * *

Axel took some time to lick his wounds before he went down to the basement. After all, he didn’t want Zexion to see him bleed. 

Axel wondered how Zexion was faring down there, knowing Marluxia’s demise was imminent and if it wasn’t than surely his was. Marluxia would no doubt come for him with his newly-strung puppet to do away with a loyal member of the Organization. The plan to use Riku had gone wildly awry. Lexaeus was dead and gone, nothing but a crater on a floor in a hallway to even mark that he had once existed.

There was a certain delight to be had in rattling off the names, mere inches behind Zexion, leaning down closer to the shorter Nobody’s height to spook him. 

As a human, Axel had known Zexion when he was nothing but a child in a too-large lab coat. Words like _prodigy, genius_, and _orphan, _were thrown around in whispers by adults around them. 

As a Nobody, Zexion had grown from literally heartless child to literally heartless adult. In the space where someone would learn emotional intelligence instead of emotionless logic, he'd grown into a rather shrewd and calculating individual.

When Axel thought of Zexion, he thought of a child with the awesome powers of illusion at his fingertips, and without the moral center that might stop him from abusing it. Sure, Axel was one to talk, but at least Axel had been  _ sixteen  _ when he died instead of  _ ten. _

Eggshell protocols were best used with this one, and Axel hated eggshells. Ideally, his goal before leaving was to clear the floor of them altogether. One less Nobody was one less rung Saïx would have to climb, and Axel was more than happy to do  _ anything  _ to make Saïx’s life easier. 

Look at how  _ thorough  _ he was. Couldn’t leave a job half done, after all. 

He traded barbs with Zexion to assess the situation with Riku more than anything. The other boy had proved too much of a danger, and Axel was quite keen to stoke that flame. Yes, Riku was  _ dangerous _ ; he’d  _ killed  _ Lexeaus. Best to take him off the board, Zexion. You can do it. Surely  _ fear  _ is a memory you can comprehend. Act on it and get sloppy, and if he didn’t, well… Then Axel would have to take more  _ direct  _ action, because those who lived got to tell the story. 

And Axel only wanted the Organization to hear  _ his.  _

* * *

The finish line was so close Axel could practically taste it, which was good because he’d spent so long in this castle that the words  _ cabin fever _ were at the forefront of his mind. 

Sure, clearing out some coworkers had helped alleviate the vague congested feeling the castle held, but this entire place was just uncomfortable, and Axel wasn’t even supposed to be able to be uncomfortable. 

A great earthquake had shaken through the castle the moment Marluxia fell, there and then gone, like a tree falling in a forest:. there for those present, nothing for those who weren’t. 

Axel was doing another lap around the castle. There was barely anyone left, and he was quite sure Zexion, the only remaining Organization member in the castle besides himself, had his hands rather full with Riku. So Axel took part in his second job: searching for some mysterious room that seem more myth than reality. 

He threw open doors with a certain level of boredom, having done this enough times by now. He knew it would always be the same empty room that greeted him. It was never anything different, but if he didn’t thoroughly try then Saïx was sure to send him back here again. Hell, he could turn over every scrap of dirt and still Saïx wouldn’t believe he did a good enough job unless he either: 

  1. Found the room. 
  2. Saïx came and looked for the room himself.

He wasn’t sure how many doors he’d opened and how many hallways he’d walked down at this point; they were all blending together, and truly he was just killing time at this point. Once he’d searched maybe a dozen rooms and found nothing, he was ready to call it quits and decide what he was going to do about Zexion. 

It was clear  _ something  _ had to be done. Axel intended to be the only one to survive the castle, but the task went from  _ on the list _ to  _ urgent _ the last time he’d been down to the basement. Sure, the intention had been to spook the last remaining Organization member in the castle. Trade barbs, rattle off names of the fallen — but Zexion just had to go and let on that he  _ knew  _ something. 

As Axel was about to take his leave of the basement, he heard Zexion call to his fleeing back: 

“It seems we were all chosen for a particular reason, doesn’t it? We’ve been using this castle for research for quite some time, but the members occupying the top floors was a new development. Tell me, Axel… Who did you receive your orders from?” 

It  _ sounded  _ like an innocent inquiry, but nothing about Zexion was innocent. 

He supposed it wasn’t difficult to figure out once Marluxia and Larxene were gone that Axel had only been among their number to make sure they failed in their schemes. Vexen had been a not-altogether-unfortunate casualty. Still, Axel wasn’t sure how the higher-ups would take it as it also meant an end to the replica program. 

Axel called over his shoulder as he disappeared into the darkness of the corridor,“From the only person who matters.” 

* * *

Zexion would have to go no matter what now. It was far too risky to leave him alive. 

Riku hadn’t done the job yet. Surprising, given whatever power he’d pulled to waste Lexaeus had left nothing but a darkness smear on the floor and a crater as a grave marker. Was Riku holding back? Afraid of his own power? Of someone else’s own power? Ironic, if he was less bloodthirsty than his friend in the light. 

Not the time to go soft, Riku. Axel leaned against one of the walls in a hallway, mulling over what to do. He was really quite tired of getting his hands dirty in this castle, but there was simply no one else to finish the job. 

Cautious footsteps down the hallway made Axel snap his head in their direction. It couldn’t have been Naminé; she was too busy with their _other,_ _lesser-known _intruder, working on figuring out how to undo her rather spectacular mess. 

He couldn’t say he was surprised to see the Riku replica — more that he had momentarily  _ forgot _ about the replica. He’d proven a bit unstable once they’d cracked his brain open like an egg,  _ and  _ he’d taken a couple rounds of blunt force keyblade trauma to that tender noggin. 

The last time Axel had seen the thing was right about the time he had been tasked to do away with Vexen. 

Well. 

An aimless soul (did replicas even have souls?) looking for meaning and identity outside of what he was made to perfectly emulate? Axel could work with this. 

A grin twisted itself onto his features as he pushed away from the wall, 

“Hey, kid…” 

* * *

And then there were none. 

A deathlike stillness settled over the castle. The only footsteps echoing in the hallway were those of the last man standing. 

The remaining guests of the castle had gone to parts unknown and frankly, Axel wasn’t too worried about that. Better to sell the narrative that it had been such a  _ struggle _ ; the keyblade wielders were just  _ too strong.  _ Such was the power of the keyblade. 

Yeah, he was pretty confident Xemnas would buy that. 

Axel gave one last sweep of the castle, but knew he’d be reporting to Saïx that he couldn’t find his mystery room. He was beginning to think you required a special password to summon it into being. 

He gathered what was left of Vexen’s notes from the lab — best return with  _ something _ — and burned Zexion’s reports. They’d never see the light of day, just to be safe. 

Any in-progress replicas he destroyed. Couldn’t have them falling into the wrong hands now. He noticed an empty container labeled “No.i”, but when he couldn’t find the resident of that little home, he just assumed it had been the Riku replica. 

He wanted to be finished with this castle, the need to leave it rising in him like a tide. Every breath he took here was increasingly suffocating. In his search for rooms and notes, he’d walked past places where his former colleagues had met their ends and found nothing to indicate that they’d died there. The knowledge of them and their passing lived only in him now. Not even Sora would recall it. 

Once all was accounted for and the silence of this place — silence brought about mostly by his hand — became a tangible being that he swore he carried on his shoulders like a pall, a heavy chain of actions and reactions, Axel left Castle Oblivion. 

He did not, however, return to the World That Never Was. 

  
  



	4. Part IV

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The inevitable return

Axel didn’t know where he had been intending to go; he only knew where he ended up. 

Radiant— _ Hollow Bastion _ was looking particularly desolate this time of year. 

He realized, standing atop a cliff and overlooking the remains of the castle, that he had not stepped foot in this world since  _ the incident _ . He knew what had become of it—a ruined world consumed by the dark, riddled with heartless and a twisted mockery of all it once was—but he had dared not return. 

This was not a better place to be. This was a  _ worse _ place to be, but he couldn’t explain his desire to stay away from the castle and his responsibilities, where the knowledge of his involvement in the death of at least  _ five _ members of their number was just his and his alone. 

Axel walked the ruins of the world, trying to place landmarks, as broken and twisted as they were. The square, the fountains, the wall where he and Isa first kissed back when they had hearts and it  _ meant _ something. 

The memory was a small burst of warmth in a cold, dead furnace. One last little spark from the coals. 

He knew everything about his life was dead and gone. He knew that. He had  _ known  _ that but there was something different in seeing it. 

Visiting his homeworld only made the disquiet he had felt in the castle grow, so he went to Twilight Town and spent who knew how many days there until the arrival of some unwanted guests in the mansion finally roused him to leave.

Hollow Bastion and then the old decrepit mansion in Twilight Town for the most depressing worlds tour ever. 

For almost forty days and forty nights he was the ghost in the mansion, haunting the halls and occasionally lighting candles with a snap of fingers to spook off the local kids. 

He had nothing but his thoughts and some old books. He didn’t even go to the clock tower; he didn’t want to deal with anything even  _ hinting _ towards the Organization at the moment, and that included Roxas and Saïx.  _ Especially  _ Saïx. Yes, Axel had just bloodied his hands in the other Nobody’s name and would gladly do it again and again and a hundred times if asked, but he knew at the end of the day it didn’t  _ mean _ anything, and Axel wasn’t quite sure why that suddenly sat so poorly deep within him.

_ Nothing _ had meant anything lately, not for a long, long time. He had spent the same amount of years alive now as he had died, and he felt at times as if he was on the precipice of something— that the scales were perfectly balanced now, and one false move could tip them oh so easily in one direction or another. 

He felt today as if they had begun to tip for the worst. 

It shouldn’t bother him.

It  _ couldn’t  _ bother him.

And yet…

* * *

Return was inevitable. 

There was no running from the Organization. Believe him, he’d thought about it  _ extensively _ in the early days, and then he saw a perfectly good and normal,  _ human- _ looking Nobody, not unlike himself, become a Dusk, and well… The sudden, terrifying knowledge that the person running the operation you found yourself drafted into upon your death could, at  _ any _ time he pleased, effectively pull the plug on your lingering vestiges of humanity like one pulls on a loose thread of a sweater and watch you unravel until there really was no  _ you  _ left, was a lot to consider when one thought about escape. 

Axel chafed under rules and constructs and _leashes, _but Axel also did not want the alternative, so his strategy of _aggressively not thinking about it _had served him pretty well all these years. 

Yet there were lingering threads of  _ dread _ within him as he slowly stepped back into the castle he had called home for the last ten years. It was the first time in a long time the idea of running coiled at the back of his mind, but he knew enough by now to dismiss it quickly. 

The only way out was through. Maybe with Roxas here they’d have a chance—if Xemnas wasn’t playing them all for fools, which Axel was pretty convinced he just might be, though he never got the damn remnants of courage to ask one of the few people that just might know the truth. Surely if Saïx knew some great and terrible secret he would share it, right? They were still friends,  _ best  _ friends, more than even if so much had changed, that bond was forged in blood and history; it was practically steel, wasn’t it?

Axel had been missing for forty days and forty nights. The Dusks reported weeks ago that the members of the Organization at Castle Oblivion were no more.

Axel had been presumed dead with the rest.

When Axel finally returned home, unannounced to anyone but Saïx in the dim light of his room, facing him as the other Nobody sat hunched over reports and files, unmoving even as Axel spoke that he was home to cut the silence, all that was asked of him was if the job was done.

Maybe steel was a strong choice of words. 

* * *

So he pretended that never happened. 

He didn’t know why it gnawed at him so much; he  _ couldn’t _ care either way, but the chilly reception hung over him like a curtain. So he quietly returned to his room and went back to Twilight Town in the morning to finally get his first ice cream since the Castle Oblivion incident. His self-appointed vacation had been extended an extra day on account of the  _ administration _ being an asshole. 

Axel was deep in thought and living with the ghost of anger at everything he did and  _ that  _ was how Saïx greeted him when he finally returned. What if he really had died back there? Saïx sure didn’t seem to care either way, and even though Axel  _ knew  _ they were Nobodies and that was beyond them, he still felt as if the last shred of his life before the incident could at least  _ pretend  _ for five seconds. 

The memories of frustration coiled on the surface of his being like a thick film to the point where he almost didn’t even hear the familiar sound of metal cutting through darkness and scraping against the ground. 

A fight? The metallic clang was familiar to him, the near musical sound like a large key being tuned against the splattering of Heartless. 

Yeah, he knew that sound. 

His melancholy thought train came to a screeching halt as he rounded the corner to see Roxas destroying the last of a group of Heartless. His Keyblade cut through their tangible-intangible bodies with practiced ease as bright pink little hearts floated upwards towards the sky. 

Axel tracked them with his eyes for a moment. He always wondered if he could just reach out and grab one—would it do anything? Probably not. But the temptation was there nonetheless. 

He looked back down to see Roxas had finished his task with greater ease than Axel ever remembered him having. Guess he was gone longer than he thought, or Roxas was just a remarkably fast learner. 

Axel stood around the mouth of the alleyway in which Roxas fought, removed and unseen from the rest of Twilight Town’s citizens. When not even a tendril of darkness remained, he couldn’t help but clap, alerting the boy to his presence. 

Axel could see Roxas’s shoulders tense and his entire form stiffen as he heard him clapping. He could guess at the thoughts running through the kid’s head right now:  _ someone saw him? Wasn’t he supposed to keep a low profile? Saïx was going to kill him!  _

Axel saw Roxas slowly turn to face the sound, the boy’s eyes growing into large saucers at the sight of his friend. If Axel were to wager he would imagine that the word on the street was that he was dead and if he knew anything about his co-workers he’d also wager that they surely  _ delighted _ with all the empty weight of their chests in telling the kid that fact. 

So Axel would make sure to prove that he was as alive as he could be to his friend.

“Alright, Roxas!” he laughed, finishing clapping to stroll over, a lazy stride, “Fight, fight, fight!” A wide grin split his face and Roxas hadn’t moved an inch; his jaw, however, had slacked slightly. 

Axel clapped a hand on his shoulder, pulling the boy out of his gawking stupor, “Hey, what gives? You look like you’ve seen a ghost.” Axel wasn’t quite sure why Roxas was looking at him like he had just walked clean out of a grave, but then he realized. 

Oh. 

He winced ever so slightly at the realization that they probably called them all for dead and how Roxas might have taken that. The kid probably has no concept of death since he seemed to have little concept of anything, despite having died once to become a Nobody. 

“They… They told me you…” Roxas still seemed to have trouble believing he was really here, staring in what Axel would ballpark as bewilderment and relief, if the kid was actually capable of it. 

He was making a pretty good show of fake emotions. 

“That what?” Axel gave a grin to help ease the memory of anxiety the boy was surely feeling. “That I  _ died _ ? C’mon, I’m tougher than that!” He gently socked Roxas in the upper arm with a punch that had absolutely no weight behind it. 

Roxas touched his arm regardless. “But they said the Dusks… That everyone was…” 

“Dusks lie.” Axel shrugged. “They got something right; the  _ weaklings  _ were eliminated. I’m too tough!” he boasted with a cocky grin. 

The slightly incredulous look on Roxas’ face told Axel he didn’t completely believe that, but neither said anything more on the matter. 

Axel certainly wasn’t going to share the entire terrible truth of the castle with him. Especially not with him looking so utterly  _ joyous _ that his friend was alive, and for a moment Axel could swear he saw  _ Sora  _ in that smile. 

“I’ll go get us some ice cream!” Roxas was gone in a flash, nearly tripping over himself in his faux excitement. 

* * *

The top of the clock tower felt more like home then the castle did that night. The cold hues of the castle and the chilly late night reception seemed to melt away in the warmth of Twilight Town’s setting sun. 

Axel watched as Roxas devoured his ice cream, legs swinging over the edge of the tower. Axel’s own ice cream was slowly beginning to drip down onto his glove and he had to quickly catch it before it did. 

“So what happened?” Roxas finally asked. Axel knew the question had been coming. 

“Secret,” he replied coolly, dull amusement dancing in his lips when Roxas pouted at him in a look that was also very  _ Sora _ .

“Oh come  _ on _ !” 

“Hey, don’t look at me, the bossmen told me I couldn’t share. Still got to write my report.” He shrugged, shifting the blame onto Saïx’s broad shoulders. He could take it. 

“You mean you haven’t reported in yet?” Roxas seemed surprised to hear that. 

“Hmm… Nope,” Axel said breezily. “Tell you what—when I do write it you can go ask Saïx about it. I’m  _ sure  _ he’ll let you read it,” he needled with a smirk. 

“Uh. Pass.” Roxas quickly dropped the subject at the prospect of interacting with Saïx anymore than was necessary. 

Axel wasn’t sure how long they spent up at the clock tower; probably longer than normal, but he honestly was in no hurry. He was, however, surprised to hear Roxas had been spending the time of his absence getting to know Number XIV more. 

He honestly didn’t know much about them except they started a week after Roxas, never took off their hood, and were named Xion. 

“They’ve been sending us on missions together so I invited Xion up here like you did for me!” Roxas smiled; it was clear his method of making friends was based solely on mimicking how he became friends with Axel, which was cute in a way. Innocent and childish in a way that was long dead to Axel, so it was a nice change of pace to see it preserved in Roxas. Guess the Organization hadn’t taken that from him yet. Good. Too many childhoods had died in those halls. 

“We should all get ice cream together! Did you know we both have keyblades? I think we’re the only ones with the same weapons,” Roxas mused. 

Interesting. 

Axel knew why Roxas could wield a keyblade, but Xion could as well? Now, Axel was no expert but that seemed… curious. He supposed he’d see for himself before he spared it anymore thought. 

Eventually, they would have to go back. Axel knew it in his bones, but this had been a nice reprieve. He waved goodbye to Roxas for the night, and heard the boy stop and look back at him before going into his room, 

“I’m really glad you’re back.” Roxas smiled before shutting the door behind him.

At least someone seemed to be. Axel couldn’t help but smile faintly. Maybe he was a little glad too, if only that it seemed to make the kid happy. He could only imagine what this place was like without a friend. 

Speaking of friends. 

Axel had no sooner shut his door, not even letting it click shut before it was opened again and Saïx swiftly entered. Axel had half a mind to think he had been waiting for Roxas to leave so he could swoop in like a damn hawk. 

“Would it  _ kill  _ you to knock?” Axel practically snapped, flopping down on his bed. Shitty or not, there was some sort of familiar comfort in one’s own bed. 

“Yes,” Saïx said flatly, drier than any desert as per usual. “You never reported in.” 

Axel sat up a bit despite having just settled down to relax, lounging like a cat and snapping up just as quick, “Is  _ that  _ what this is about? I came directly to you last night and you couldn’t be bothered!” His words had more bite than he wanted to admit, but they were out now, lingering in the air. 

“Appearing in my room unannounced in the middle of the night is not reporting in,” Saïx said coolly. 

“Maybe I was doing my best impression of you,” Axel fired back swiftly. “I didn’t know this street was one way,” he drawled as if becoming bored. 

“Castle Oblivion…” Saïx began as if Axel had said nothing at all. 

“Are you just upset I didn’t bring you back a present?” Axel couldn’t help but coo, interrupting. 

“The traitors…” Saïx started up again as if Axel had said nothing. 

“I was  _ thinking _ Marluxia’s scythe, but pink really isn’t your color,” Axel interrupted, again, this time with a voice coated in honey, laced with poison. 

Saïx let out an exaggerated sigh. “Axel.” 

“Saïx,” came the sugary reply, because now Axel was just making a game of how many buttons he could push, like a kid in an elevator.

“Are you done?” The sternness was back. 

“Perhaps,” Axel mused. 

Axel swung his legs over the edge of the bed and turned to regard Saïx fully, elbows resting on his knees. “Taken care of, every one of them—is that what you wanted to hear?” He waved his hand dismissively and raised an eyebrow, looking up at Saïx, who looked down without even the slightest trace of emotion, remembered or not. 

Out of all of them, Saïx always seemed to have to try the hardest to pretend. Axel wasn’t quite sure if that was better or worse. Sure, Axel could move and act and  _ seem  _ human, but he wasn’t. At least Saïx’s humanity or lack thereof wasn’t usually a debate. You looked at him in his cold detachment and knew you were looking at something that seemed human but  _ wasn’t.  _ Axel sometimes wondered if that was kinder. 

No pretenses. Just reality, cold and stark. 

It was Axel and the rest of them that were cruel mockeries of humanity. The pretty little lie. Wolves in sheep’s clothing. 

Saïx was just a wolf. 

“Yes, actually it is,” Saïx’s matter-of-fact drawl cut through Axel’s thoughts. “Did you find it?” 

A loaded question Axel knew had been coming. 

“If I did, don’t you think I would have  _ told _ you? C’mon,” he sighed, resting his chin in his hand now. 

“Did you  _ look?”  _

“You sound like my parents,” Axel huffed. “Yes, I looked, but you know that’s like looking for a needle in a haystack and the haystacks are on fire.” 

“Shouldn’t be a problem for you then.” He could swear for a moment Saïx sounded amused, and that was better than nothing, if not unwanted at the moment. 

“You know what I mean.” Axel shot him something of a look. 

Saïx sighed, pretending at exasperation as best as he possibly could.

“Gotta hand it to you, though,” Axel mused thoughtfully, slowly getting up and lazily striding over to Saïx, placing a hand on his shoulder and leaning in so very close to whisper into his ear, “About the traitors, you knew exactly what was up.” He wondered how much Saïx knew about this little outfit that he did not, all the background secrets…

Saïx made the smallest shrug of shoulders, breaking the rigidity for a fleeting moment. “I merely rounded up the ones that were getting in the way.” He dismissed the praise easily, the faint shrug serving to dislodge Axel’s hand from his shoulder.

Axel couldn’t help himself; the sarcastic reply left his lips before he had a hope of stopping it. “Whoa there—was I one of the ones you wanted to erase?” He took a step back, any contact well and truly broken now. 

Saïx waited a little bit  _ too _ long before replying, and in each millisecond Axel felt the span of eternity because he couldn’t wrap his brain around  _ why _ the answer wasn’t an immediate, “No, of course not.” Axel didn’t know what emotional memory to reach for. Anger? That seemed right. 

“Good to see you made it back safe,” Saïx  _ finally _ said, but the damage was done. Axel had to bite back an even more sarcastic reply before it slipped from him. 

_ What? Worried I wouldn’t?  _

He knew that would only serve to put Saïx in an even fouler mood, so he said nothing. Axel truly did not  _ feel  _ like flipping the switch that would turn them from uncomfortable needling to  _ fight _ . Even if neither of them had the emotional depth to really engage in either. So instead he went back to business. 

“I disposed of Zexion too, by the way,” Axel added lowly, his tone growing uncharacteristically serious for a moment. Saïx paused halfway to the door as Axel continued, “I moved things along just the way you wanted. For now.” 

Axel looked Saïx squarely in the eyes then, the amber eyes he didn’t recognize. The threat minor all things considered, but still there. A fair warning. He needed to push back in some way after all, lest Saïx continue to walk all over him; besides, if these plans that they had been coddling for so long continued to pull Saïx further away then Axel was more than happy to pull the plug and burn those ideations to the ground. 

Whatever plan or goal that they thought they had was not worth losing whatever remnants of each other they had in this place. 

Even if there was a part of Axel that knew it was already gone. 

* * *

Figures it was right back to work as usual upon his return. Guess it would kill Saïx to give him the day off. So much for gratitude. Axel already knew how the conversation would go anyway, mentally playing it out in his head.  _ You had a forty-day long vacation. Get back to work.  _ Sheesh. 

Roxas’s desire for all three of them to convene at the clocktower hit a snag when Xion practically up and  _ vanished _ on a mission. Axel didn’t want to vocalize his suspicions to Roxas over what not returning from a mission could mean, since he had been directly responsible for the last group of Organization members not returning from their mission. 

Axel wasn’t sure what to think. He honestly didn’t know enough about their mysterious member to think much of anything aside from it being suspicious to not return from a mission in ten days. He promised Roxas he would pick Saïx’s brain about the matter and see if he knew anything. 

Axel did not know this was something of a landmine. 

“Why?” Saïx’s question came out like a bark and was leagues harsher than Axel’s own question, which had been a curious inquiry. 

“Why? Why do you always have to answer a question with another question?” Axel couldn’t keep the sigh from his voice. “It’s not a big deal, Saïx. I told Roxas I’d ask.” 

Saïx exhaled air in a way that vaguely sounded like a “hmph”. He was silent for a moment, regarding Axel through slightly narrowed eyes as if deciding whether to release the information he was looking for. A part of Axel always thought he enjoyed making him beg for answers to menial questions. 

“Number XIV was sent out on a mission and never returned,” Saïx finally said. 

“And that doesn’t concern you?” Axel raised an eyebrow. That was certainly unusual. 

“Not really.” Saïx mentally was already on to something else, turning the pages on his clipboard before he regarded Axel slyly. “Does it concern  _ you _ ?” he asked, raising a brow as well, ever so slightly. 

Axel shrugged a shoulder, turning to leave. “Not really,” he said as he headed back to his room.

Axel didn’t want to give Roxas the bad news, but it seemed as if his new friend might not be making it back. Nobodies couldn’t mourn or miss, but it would still be terrible to hear about the potential loss of a friend. Again. 

At least Axel thought so, anyway.

* * *

Number XIV  _ Xion  _ was an odd one. Axel swore their voice must have been barely above a whisper because he couldn’t seem to hear them speak or see their lips move under that hood, but Roxas seemed to be engaging in a full conversation. 

They had finally found the missing member in Twilight Town. The prolonged absence of one of the Organization’s new keyblade bearers surely proved a strain enough for Saïx to finally send staff to  _ do _ something about it. 

Roxas seemed as happy as a Nobody could possibly be over all three of them enjoying ice cream together, so he wasn’t going to do anything that might disrupt that. Even if he had more questions than answers regarding Xion, the keyblade being the most interesting and pressing of these questions. Axel knew about three things about the keyblade, but he did know why Roxas surely could use it. So why could Xion? Another wielder’s Nobody? They were a relatively rare breed and apparently dropping like flies. 

Xion was quiet the whole time, staring distantly as the slowly melting ice cream in a way that almost reminded Axel of how Roxas sometimes could get. He slowly bit into his ice cream, contemplating the strangeness of that. 

“I can’t… summon the keyblade anymore,” Xion finally admitted. 

If either Roxas or Axel could muster genuine surprise they probably would have. Instead they gave the best approximation two Nobodies could give. 

So that was why Xion up and vanished for several days. 

Axel only distantly listened as Xion vocalized their anxieties over this fact and Roxas tried to provide some level of assurance. The dance of those without hearts trying to sympathize. 

While they did that, the wheels in Axel’s head were turning. 

They needed a solution until they could figure something out… Perhaps Roxas could secretly cover for Xion until they sorted this mess out. It was the best plan Axel had, and honestly it wasn’t even that good because Saïx could so easily shoot it down if he was in a  _ mood, _ and he was always in a  _ mood,  _ so Axel was going to have to take countermeasures and—

The brakes were slammed on that thought train as he realized both Roxas and Xion were looking at him with what he could only guess at was gratitude? What did anything look like anymore? Just tiny echoes of a language he no longer spoke. 

Amidst the chorus of, “That’s a great idea!” and, “Thank you, Axel!” Xion lowered their hood to properly thank him, smiling. 

Why did Xion look like Naminé?   


* * *

Kingdom Hearts hung in the sky above the World That Never Was, bathing the entire balcony in ethereal light that was both oddly welcoming and terrifying. The great mass of hearts before them, hearts collected from every heartless slain with the keyblade, brought forth and held in their world by some unseen power, shaping it and molding it until it made Kingdom Hearts. That light touched the faces of every member of the Organization, called forth to witness this momentous event. 

Normally, early morning meetings would involve dragging every single member of the order to the round room begrudgingly because being a Nobody did not make early morning meetings any less awful. 

No one had to drag anyone out this time, however; they all gathered quickly as soon as the heart-shaped beacon appeared in their sky, drawn to the light and the promise of their hearts hopefully in their grasp at last. One could almost feel them crawling forth from the primordial darkness and reaching longingly towards that light. 

Axel almost couldn’t believe what he was seeing. Was it really happening? Were they really getting closer to being completed? His eyes slowly lowered from the beacon in front of him down to observe Xemnas. 

Their leader had not moved his eyes from Kingdom Hearts since gathering them all and giving some faux rousing speech about their goals and fruition and the usual buzz words Axel had long since come to expect. No, the amber eyes had not moved, and there was a form of  _ delight _ therein that Axel couldn’t name—but it certainly wasn’t benevolent. 

Despite Kingdom Hearts looming above their sky in a way that one could contemplate reaching out and grasping it, Axel had never felt further from his heart. 

This should fill him with the ghostly echoes of joy. So why did joy feel so much like dread?

* * *

It had been over a decade since Axel joined the Organization. 

A decade since the parts of him that still distantly felt like  _ Lea  _ had slowly begun to fizzle and die like the last feeble sparks of a dying bonfire. Coldness and dryness in the air to suffocate. 

Axel felt like Lea in the way an impression in dirt feels like the boot that once stepped there. Whatever was left of his humanity had kept on walking to greener pastures (probably literally) and he was still here. 

A decade of the Organization and a decade of questions that never got answers, so he stopped asking or caring about them. The how and whys felt like grand existential questions he would never get the answers to. “What was the true purpose of the Organization?” felt as lofty as, “What is the meaning of existence?” 

Yet since getting involved with Roxas… and Xion, since becoming  _ friends  _ with them, the questions came back again. New and pressing in a way they hadn’t been before. Maybe it was because he wasn’t a child anymore and there was little anyone could do to stop his pursuit of knowledge, or maybe because he was trying  _ harder _ this time. Fueled by what? The need to help others? 

That definitely wasn’t it. 

Still, something possessed him to dig out Vexen’s old research and slave over the pages, deciphering each paragraph of cramped, frenzied text. 

So many strange things had happened that he couldn’t ignore it anymore. He needed to know if there was anything in these musty old journals about keyblades or Nobodies or anything. 

Axel hated not being able to answer the questions his friends asked, in part because of secrets that were too terrible to share and in part because he genuinely didn’t know. He didn’t know why there seemed to be a strange unspoken connection between Roxas, Xion, and the keyblade. He didn’t know why Saïx seemed to hate them; even if he lacked the heart to do so, the other Nobody was clearly making his best effort of it, especially towards Xion. Axel didn’t know how to answer them about Saïx, despite their history. He saw it happening, but kept hoping it would just stop. That at the very least they could all be civil. 

The more pressing matter in his opinion was Roxas and Xion themselves. There was something different about them, and not different in the way that had previously been reserved for keyblade-bearing children who acted just a bit too human. This different was like watching day go into night. Both the sun and the moon could not be in power at the same time, and like the sun and the moon when Roxas was at his prime, Xion was not, and when Xion was at her prime, Roxas withered. 

It was certainly curious, and Axel wanted to know more about why his friends often appeared like they were in some sort of twisted, symbiotic relationship. 

The strangeness that he couldn’t quite place ate away at him and drove him to try to pick Saïx’s brain about it, which was a move of utter desperation at this point. 

Their distance wasn’t new. The rift had slowly been growing for as long as Axel could remember now; he just woke up one day and finally realized just how wide the chasm had become. 

The chasm had grown so very wide, and for the first time Axel felt no need to try to cross it. He felt a level of contentment being on the other side. He had other friends now; there was no longer that one, token pillar, that nostalgic memory of a friendship that once was but had long since died. They just had been living with the corpse, rotting and festering between them. 

He supposed he had already begun to bury it and mourn as much as his nonexistent heart would allow. 

Axel seemed to be the only one who had managed to progress the five stages of grief and not just spin helplessly in the second stage. The past seemed long dead, but only one of them seemed to have clarity enough to admit it. 

They didn’t talk much anymore outside of Organization business, but that wasn’t a new development. This was just the final death throes, when the cancer had slowly been eating them away for years. 

Axel only knew how much Saïx clung to the past they hadn’t talked about in months when he volleyed damning words at the end of yet another tense interaction: another demand for Axel to return to Castle Oblivion and traipse the hallways where his greatest sins had been committed. 

Before this it had been the occasional snide remark, as was Saïx’s style, muttered lowly under breath so only Axel could hear about coddling his friends and becoming a nuisance when Axel rearranged pieces in a game he didn’t even know he was playing. 

Saïx, who hadn’t seemed to care about their friendship outside of what it could do for him and their plans, suddenly couldn’t bear to see Axel interacting with anyone other than him. 

In the past Axel might have made a snide comment about that, but that was the past and the novelty of, “oh, jealous are we?” had worn off long ago. It was almost as if Axel had woken up in the morning and everything that had been foggy and uncertain in the back of his mind about Saïx suddenly was in crystal clear focus. 

Their friendship was dying. The only thing left was Saïx’s intent to climb the latter of the Organization to whatever end he still held there. Axel somehow doubted it was really all for some mystery girl they’d met over a decade ago. 

Axel recalled a moment only a few weeks ago, before he was to leave for Castle Oblivion, the hushed plans between the two of them. Everything Axel was going to do there was unspoken, and yet silently they both  _ knew _ Axel would do all of Saïx’s dirty work at that castle. He’d be Saïx’s eyes and hands, the enforcer of his will at the castle:the will for everyone who resided there to be destroyed. Axel did it without question, and would have gladly done it again and again if Saïx had asked more sins of him. 

That Axel felt so far away and long ago now. This Axel was getting a little tired of always having to be the one dirtying and bloodying his hands in Saïx’s name, burning a pathway to Saïx’s goals and getting nothing but ice in return. 

He was feeling rather put upon, truly; what was the point in doing and giving so much, trying to reach out when the other party never offered the same? Never made a move to catch the line Axel threw, the little gestures of friendship, casual touches,  _ anything.  _ Saïx just let the line drop. So Axel stopped throwing it. 

Axel did, however, wish that these new, unseen, and clumsy barriers they had built up around each other extended to the door of his room, which was often left ignored as an obstacle creating privacy. Saïx felt no need to obey  _ this  _ particular boundary, it would seem. 

“Ever heard of knocking?” Axel spat, the indignation of having one’s privacy interrupted rang in his voice. 

Where did Saïx get off thinking he could always just barge in like this unannounced when he pleased? Okay, so in the past it had involved a good amount of getting off, but that was beside the point.

“Tell me about Xion.” The demand was sudden and struck Axel as completely out of left field.

“Why?” Axel sat up from his relaxed position on his bed, a brow raised high. 

Saïx was unmoving, a pillar of rigidity. “You two seem pretty close.” The words came out slightly clipped, more clipped than he probably intended. 

Axel leaned forward slightly to rest his elbows on his knees, “So what? You really going to tell me you’re what? Jealous of a sixteen-year old?” How old was Xion anyway? He assumed the same as Roxas. “Even if I did know some great secret—which I don’t—why would I rat on my friend to you?” It was clear Saïx despised the kid for reasons only known to Saïx. Axel leaned back into his bed, resuming sitting with his hands behind his head. “I think you should go,” he mused. 

Saïx was silent for several long moments, and Axel thought that perhaps he finally did pop that blood vessel in his temple that always seemed to twitch ever so slightly when Axel was being particularly annoying to him. 

But they were Nobodies and couldn’t really invoke any real reaction in one another. 

“You two will be on a mission together today,” Saïx finally spoke. Axel honestly thought he’d left. 

“Well thank you,  _ sir,  _ for personally delivering that message to me,” Axel drawled, cracking an eye open to look at Saïx and see that vein pulse again. 

“We also need you back at Castle Oblivion again soon.” 

“Of course you do.” Axel knew it was only a matter of time. “We’re not going to find it just by looking, you know,” he added dryly. The room Saïx wanted to find so very badly, as if it held the secrets to Xemnas’s true machinations, wasn’t going to just materialize in front of them because Saïx wished it hard enough. 

“If you need additional motivation then have this: Xion comes from the same castle Naminé can be traced to.” 

That actually  _ was _ interesting information and Axel looked up at him, taking the bait despite his better judgement.

“You’ll be going to Castle Oblivion again,” Saïx continued as if nothing had happened. “Expect the orders soon.”

The conversation ended there, but Axel knew it wouldn’t be the end of this. There was clearly more to this story, and he mulled it over, acting like nothing was wrong to Roxas and Xion. He kept so many secrets; he wasn't truly lying when he told them there were dark secrets he had to keep to himself. His words had cast an unseen pall over their time together when he said it. If they only knew the half of it. Axel was quick to make light of his rather macabre humor before cutting their time short. He had to return to castle Oblivion, alone. 

* * *

So he toed the line and did what Saïx asked of him, returning to Castle Oblivion again and again. Every time they saw each other lately Axel knew the ask was coming; it was almost all they spoke of lately. The castle, the chamber, Xion for whatever reason: all these topics and only these topics circled around them endlessly as vultures. It was becoming too much, and Axel didn’t even know how anything, let alone conversation, could become too much for him. 

Axel felt the pinprick of ghostly anger already brewing in his gut when Saïx crossed paths with him in the hallway on what was supposed to be his first vacation day in months. For a moment he hoped Saïx would just keep on walking. No snide comments whispered under breath, no demands to go to Castle Oblivion for the  _ third fucking time, _ as if Saïx got some sick delight in making Axel traipse the hallways where his greatest sins were committed. 

Alas, it was not to be, since Saïx scowled as they passed each other. “Where have you been?” 

Axel couldn’t keep the exasperation out of his voice, remembered or not, exasperation of holding one’s breath in hopes an interaction would not come and those desires going up in smoke, “It’s my vacation. I can take all the time I want,” he drawled, as if each word spent on Saïx was far too much effort. Axel moved to walk past him. “You spent your day working? My condolences.” He gave him a short pat on the shoulder in mock sympathy. 

“You’re letting yourself get too attached to them.” Saïx had a way of just saying things that he had clearly mulled over for quite some time, having complete imaginary conversations; when they left his head and actually became reality it came off as completely out of left field. Axel knew this sentence was accompanied by a mental diatribe he wasn’t privy to. 

“Yeah. Whatever you say,” Axel responded dryly, moving to continue past Saïx he wasn’t in the mood for this. He wasn’t in the mood for anything, but this new-old song and dance least of all. 

As Axel retreated down the hallway, he heard Saïx mutter to his fleeting back, loud enough for Axel to clearly hear, “You’ve changed.” 

Axel stopped, back tensing ever so slightly, and for a very brief moment he stood there, debating silently with himself whether he was going to dignify that with a response. 

And then he kept walking. 

  
  
  
  
  
  
  



End file.
